Plans for re-shooting by Lucy Barker and Maddy Ryder

We have decided that as some of the miming clips are out of time, we are going to add in some more performance clips of Grace on the piano. We are planning to film this on Wednesday and this will fill the places that we have - where we have cut out the out of time singing.

Editing the video 3 by Lucy Barker and Maddy Ryder

We have started to try and a black and white affect to the children to show that they are in the dark and are victims of consumerism. We learnt how to do this using a youtube tutorial. To do this we added a colour correction and then a shape mask which is the white circle surrounding our character in the picture below. We then shaped this circle desaturated it to make it the appropriate darkness.

We tried this, however we decided not to use it as because our shot is a pan the affect moves with the image and made parts of the shot that we wanted to keep bright, darker. Instead we decided to just keep the saturation low and then gradually wash her character out as each clip of her went by, showing that the materialism is washing her out. We also did this for the other children. 

Rough Cut 2 by Lucy Barker and Maddy Ryder

Our second rough cut makes more sense because we managed to get the dog walking scene finished, we had some problems with continuity and breaking 'the line' but we resolved this by reversing some of the clips. We still need to go over some of the mouthing to lyrics because it's not perfect yet, but we are proud of it so far!

We have a small amount of filming and re-filming to do which will take the place of the place holders. These will be short clips depicting our teenage boy actor (Alesi) playing video games and ignoring our actress (Meg), who will eventually have to take the game from him and physically drag him and the little girl (Amber) out of the door. The little girl will stay on her phone the whole time, ignoring what is happening around her. We aim to use this clip to show how technology is affecting children, and how they are losing touch with the real world.

Changing the artists name by Lucy Barker

Tatiana is the original artist and her song is copyright free, and we felt that her name didn't fit her image so we are going to create a star image for "Grace" and call the album "Common Ground".

Grace fits the name better because it has many meanings such as:

disposition to be generous or helpful; goodwill

This fits her songs from the album which are all about freeing us from the consequences of materialism and in a way this is her being helpful and doing a good deed.

The name Grace  is widely recognised, and everyone knows the meaning behind it, so it will be easy for the audience to associate it with her character, especially as she is seen as the 'hero', being good natured and down to earth in the face of materialism and snobbery.

A single syllable, simple name is also good as it fits the honest, simplistic nature that we are trying to give to our main character.

Editing the video 2 by Lucy Barker

We have had to film the remaining clips last night in order to meet our deadline. However this means that when we were filming it was dark outside so this has caused problems because we filmed our actress shoving the kids out the door to go to the party and as the door opened you could see the darkness outside.

This clip is going in the middle of the video, and the dog walking scene, which was filmed in the day, comes afterwards, so we were unsure as to whether the audience would understand that the dog walking scene was like a flashback 'earlier that day' kid of thing.

We decided to make the clips of the dog walking scene progressively darker, but not pitch black so you can still see whats going on. This looks natural because it's like the story is being told as the day goes on.

We used the colour scale and exposure to control the overall colour look to make it look like later on in the day.

So far the most difficult part of the editing process has been getting the mouthing of the lyrics to match the music, we just have to spend a lot of time on this to make it perfect.

Storyboarding by Lucy Barker and Maddy Ryder

Here are some examples of storyboards that we created.

Storyboarding became very useful for us because it gave us a baseline and a starting point to film from, we often changed the shots and they turned out different to how we planned, but we did this so it had a better affect. For example we planned to have a shot were a young hand grabs a phone after her older sister tells her to get ready for a party, but instead we replaced this shot with a shot of games being put quickly onto a pile and then being shoved off. We thought that this would be more symbolic of the lack of care that children have for possessions - video games often cause frustration, and a lack of empathy as the games themselves have no consequences; you can shoot people, steal, and commit various other crimes with no punishment. Kids learn that they can do what they like, and become aggressive when they cannot do the same in real life.

We counterbalanced this in the scene where the girl chases the boy for the controls. It is quite a humorous shot, making the point that although they have a negative effect, it is unlikely that every child will be turned into a violent criminal by playing a video game.

The collection of dog walking shots was planned out with storyboarding really well, we knew exactly what we were doing during the shoot, and I think this showed. It turned out to be the best part of the video and I think that we should have done even more storyboarding for the party scenes.

Editing the Video 1 by Lucy Barker

Now that we have most of our filming done and it is on the timeline in the right order we have started to edit. So far we have slowed down clips that wern't long enough so they fit but yesterday we were introduced to changing the colour of clips, using the flip tool and zooming in by          . He noticed that in some of the clips the lighting is different to the following clip which makes it look inconsistant, so we can change this using the bit which is highlighted in red.

We also needed to zoom in the clip shown above becuase it was filmed on a different setting. Although when you zoom in you loose the quality we had to becuase the clip stood out as there were black boxes either side. To do this we used the scroll bar showen highlighted in red and then we can drag the clip into position. 

Whilst editing I realised that some of the clips especially the ones were our actresses, Grace, is mouthing the lyrics, were out of time, so we organised to re-film the clips. This time we helped the actress to practise the lyrics and made her do it to the right point of the music. This looked much more proffessional.

To also make it look more proffessional we had to make sure it didnt look staged. For example there were points when the clip started to early and you could see that the actors were looking into the camera waiting for there cue. To solve this we simply made sure every clip started when the action started to make it look more natural.

We used the flip tool becuase at some points it looked as though we had 'crossed the line'.



It refers to an imaginary line which cuts through the middle of the scene, from side to side with respect to the camera. Crossing the line changes the viewer's perspective in such as way that it causes disorientation and confusion. For this reason, crossing the line is something to be avoided.

In the dog walking scene it looked as though we had crossed it, so we used the flip tool (shown below) which helped it look more coherent. To do this we just clicked and dragged onto the appropriate clip.