‘The post-production process can be the most important part of the filming process’
How important has the post-production stage been in your foundation and advanced portfolios and how have your skills developed over these two years?Post-production was the most important role in my foundation portfolio. When we filmed our footage, the clips were very dark, so we were able on Imovie to adjust the brightness to make it more successful. We chose a piece of music to go alongside our thriller video which started off slow and mysterious, that then went on to drop the beat and have a really fast jumpy beat. In order for our footage to match the music to be more effective, we edited the clips, by speeding some parts up and slowing some parts down. We also edited some footage so they would play in reverse. For example we have a scene where a base ball bat was thrown down the stars, we slowed it down so when the bat hit each step it also matched the beat of the music, we then repeated the clip and made it in reverse, so then it looked as if the bat had picked itself up and travelled back up the stairs, but at its normal fast speed, this was really effective as it created a mysterious feel to the video. We included transitions to make our thriller film more exciting for the audience’s eye and included text in our video that read the title and producers that hit a thriller convention.Watching the film 'seven' we took ideas as we were inspired by the directors outcome, in order to be successful and meet the thriller conventions we developed the ideas we took from this film to make our outcome more dynamic and to ensure it was as successful as the film but with some personal touches and differences. The hand held camera scene, we used intertexuality with the film 'Blair Witch' Using these ideas; we really needed the editing tools to make it different and effective. The mixture of hand held footages in the dark woods and the use of camera angles in the house where the murderer lived worked really well together. We edited the footages to create a mixture of the film at different times, keeping the audience on their feet and engaged as to understand what is going on.
I feel the most successful part of our thriller was the use of the slow motion tool and speeding some clips up, this has the effect of keeping the audience engaged, and looking at disturbing images flashed in your face at two different speeds. On the other hand, our advanced portfolio was a lot different to how we produced the thriller film. After many hours of footage and editing, we decided not to use the video camera, and instead use still images throughout the majority of the music video, keeping some short video footage that we liked. Because we used still images, we did not use any transitions, as the still images almost jolted throughout created a nice effect as our music was very fast and had a strong beat, so this worked well. Instead of using transitions, to make out music video as successful as it could be and keep the audience engaged, we used colourisation. We used black and white for a part of the video of the lamp, to keep the audience engaged, and it looked effective. We used it also on a piece where we recorded in a car and on the motor way bridge looking down and recording the cars. We put these clips into reverse as they looked much more effective and convey that these images are from the past and not present. They matched the music perfectly as we speeded them up. Another reason why we did this was because our music video had the niche of lights, and in order to exaggerate the lights coming from the cars, the black and white colourisation worked perfectly as the lights really stood out.
We also to the end of my music video, have an image of the male character in blue and female in pink, the stereo typical colours for a male and female, suggesting the two different types of people and because our music video is suggestive to cheating, the colours make it obvious that the two characters have a link to each other.
To conclude, I feel the post-production stage been in your foundation and advanced portfolios have really made my videos as successful as they are, without any editing tool, each video would not reach any of the conventions, or be successful.
The editing of a product means you can put in your own person touches and ideas, and take it up to another level.
I feel I have progressed in the last two years with my products, as this year for my music video I thought much more about what will be successful rather than thinking ‘oh that will do’ with some of the dark grainy clips. I have become more confident using the editing tools meaning I could experiment much more with the music video, creating something much more successful that my last production.
