For our preliminary task, Mr. Wunker asked the class to pair with people we have never worked with. He essentially wanted everyone to collaborate with other schoolmates so we can learn more skills and also share new ideas that we can apply to our music videos. I asked Noor de Biolley if she wanted to work together on the preliminary task and she agreed. It took us some time to choose a song that we wanna work with as we both wanted to make a funny video. This was mainly due to the fact that both our groups (for the coursework) are doing a slow-paced and more drama-based music video. Eventually, we listened to Katy Perry's "Hot n Cold" and we both really liked the fast beat of the song.
Noor and I worked with the storyboard but she was the one who drew it so I told her to compensate and make the workload equal, I will do the lyrics annotation.
STORYBOARD
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LYRICS ANNOTATION - Hot n Cold By: Katy Perry
FILMING PROCESS
Overall our filming process took two days, we essentially filmed our clips after school hours. We had to gather a lot of costumes because we wanted to do a montage of us changing into different clothes. Our first day of filming is October 25th, 2022 (Wednesday), around 4:00. We shot most of our scenes in the greenscreen room, the room is not very spacious because the room is actually used as storage for books that the English Department gives to their students for lessons. Due to this, Noor and I had to utilize the limited space available. On the first day of shooting, we finished all scenes from our shortlist wherein we needed to dress up as "Ninja Turtles".
The challenging part of the shooting is the horse head costume was so big and heavy that the camera could barely see our whole costume in the frame. We also couldn't move a lot due to limited space as we might end up breaking and knocking over the setup we have. Initially, we wanted to go to the Hutong areas to ask "aunties & uncles" to dance with us. However, it was really cold that day and we had bulky costumes (Horse Head & Turtle Shell). While walking back to get some newly charged lighting equipment, we saw one of Harrow's Cleaning ladies (Ayi). We asked her politely if she can spare some 5 minutes of her time to dance with us. She was very enthusiastic and helpful to us. We used fish lenses and wide lenses for scenes with the Ayi.
Our second day of filming was on October 27th, 2022 (Thursday). The second day of filming was a lot busier because we had a lot of costume changes to do. We also needed to set up the fog machine because we wanted to learn on controlling the fog effect on our clips. I was the first one to act and Noor was the one who took my shots.
I had to stay in the same position so I marked my spot with a book that was lying around. Noor also helped me change to multiple costumes by giving me the props I needed so I wouldn't have to move around the small space of the room.
I gave the same pulp-fiction shirt and white tutu skirt for Noor to wear. This was an intentional costume change so we will be able to create a sense of continuity. We also asked for some red paint from some art students. We painted the white tutu skirt with red paint to illustrate the lyrics: "You PMS like a B*tch, I would know". Another conscious costume choice we had is wearing red and blue to symbolize "hot and cold".
For editing, Noor and I wanted to both be able to expand and improve our editing skills. So we both decided to edit our own take on the storyboard. Personally, I struggled with isolating us from the green screen cause we had some minor flaws with lighting that messes up the isolation. The lipsyncing part was pretty easy for me, however, it was the acting that makes it look like there is a sound delay in the editing. Another flaw, of the clips we took, is the "grainy" effect on some clips while the other clips look really smooth. This was mainly due to different lighting when we changed location (ig. the lighting in the greenscreen was far more consistent than from the clips we took of the ayi). I also enjoyed using the smoke machine, we had to work quickly because the smoke evaporates in the room.
Filming equipment used
- Camera: Nikon Wide Lenses (D3400) & Sony(a7 II) Fish Eye Lenses - Lights: 2 LED Lights and 1 Soft Box
- Tripod
Version 1 - Noor's edit Since Noor used her phone to edit, the resolution of the video on computers when we presented it in class was quite low. I really liked the editing she did with 0:24-0:31 and also putting in subtitles. Her font choice was giving off similar aesthetics to Katy Perry's style. For Noor's edit and my edit, we made use of our extra clips by adding them as bloopers.
Version 2 - My edit The resolution of editing is quite nice as used my desktop (iMac) for it. However, when I was transferring some clips from the memory card to my computer, not all clips were showing... took me a week or so to find out that the clip I was missing is in a different memory card. It took me longer to edit but I was able to finish my version of the task.