18th February 2011
Recording and Editing

We started some of the recording today but due to the fact that we couldn't use our original setting that we wanted to which was the dance studio at the Northwood campus due to the exam desks being up. Therefore we decided that we were going to use the drama studio at the Foxley campus, this similarly to the dance studio at the Northwood campus had dark black curtains and was a similar setting so we would be able to achieve what we wanted to from the room.

When we got into the drama studio at Foxley, t worked to our advantage as we found that there were 4 podiums that we were going to use, this was good as we could make our music video look more professional and then this would also be following the conventions of a already famous girl bands music videos. As we first originally did not plan on using the 4 separate podiums we decided that we were going to have to practise our little routine that we had made up as when we choreographed it we did not plan to have a confided space that we had to stick to. We had to make sure all of our poses that we did were confide to a small space so that they could be performed on the little areas we had each, however we found out that we did end up looking more professional and more like a garland.

This part of the filming did take us longer than anticipated, it took us about 2 hours to gain this little piece of routine footage as we kept having to re shoot the footage as we were not happy with the way it turned out the first times. Also we found that with there being four of us it was difficult to get take where all four of us were doing it perfect without any mistakes.

We decided that because there was not stage lighting in the drama studio we were going to try and create our own lighting, we did this by turning off the main lights and positioning 6 strong lighted lamps around us to make it look like spotlighting, we found that we had to position some of the lamps pointing outwards as if they were landing straight on us they were washing us out and making the colours look weird.

Also there was a smart board in the dance studio which we did not know was there, therefore we had to cover it up using black blankets, this was because there was not a black curtain covering it like the rest of the room. As this was not our original filming location, there was a lot of things that we had to do to make it to the standard that we first wanted, but in the end we were successful.

After we had finished recording we decided that we were going to edit it straight away so that we would not have lots of footage to edit all in one go if we waited until all of our recording was done. Therefore we went back to our Media class room and uploaded the footage onto the Apple Mac Computers, we decided that we were going to edit the footage in iMovie, this was because we researched into other programmes such as Adobe Premier and Studio 14 but we decided that we were going to stick to iMovie as we used this for our AS Media project and found that this was the easiest to use, and we were already familiar with the software.

For the first 20-30 seconds we decided that we wanted a lot of flashing images and fast cuts, this was to create a shocking effect at the start of the video, therefore we decided that it would be best to use the effects tool on iMovie, this meant that we could change the saturation swell which would make it look better and more professional. For the first bit of filming that we did the camera quality was not the best therefore we decided that we would change the contrast and the saturation so that it looked more rusty and rough. We went for this effect so that it still looked very professional. iMovie also gave us the options in where we were able to slow down our clips, this for the walking towards the camera bit, made it look a lot more professional and made it look more like it was a proper girlbands music video.