FMP: Evalution

Over the course of the 8 weeks my base idea has stayed relatively the same however due to a few inevitable hiccups it has caused some of the aspects such as location and edit style to change.

I feel that I have achieved my desired aim in making two edits in order to promote Tim’s EP. Both edits though very simply edited, reached their goal of being calm and soothing, which was the main attribute I wanted both edits to take on. The duality of the audio and visual styles and how they perfectly accent each other is another thing I am particularly proud of.

When comparing my final product with my first proposal, it is clear I fell short of producing three linked songs in one large edit for Tim’s EP. This was for a number of reasons. The first was that a scene filmed on Tim’s balcony as part of the “Midday” section was deleted from my cameras SD card. We decided that this was something we would have to move on from by continuing to film the other locations and adjust our proposals accordingly.

Another area I felt was very tricky to overcome was syncing the audio to the video of the one-shot instrumental. This took many hours of trial and error and was possibly one of the hardest edits I have had to manipulate.

Due to already losing the balcony scene I did not want to give up on a second song as this would further weaken my project and greatly diminish my chances of receiving a high grade I worked so hard towards. The last area I felt I could have done better in is the deconstruction of my first edit in my blog. I had no ability to include screenshots of the premiere pro timeline sequence as this file had been lost from changing editing locations between college and home.

There are some areas I feel I could improve in when doing this project in the second year. I would still keep the original proposal slightly overambitious as this would give me something to try and reach for rather than creating a project within my comfort zone. This project I worked with a friend, Tim, and whilst this was useful to help generate ideas and produce something I would never personally have the skills to do, I feel working by myself would be much easier and less time-consuming as I wouldn’t have to pass any idea changes or decisions by another person.

The time between the start of the project and Tim finishing his songs took longer than I had expected. As this was the first project based around music I have produced my concept of how long songs took to create and finish was naive. The first few weeks of the project I left Tim to his own devices to write and perfect his songs whilst I produced research in aid of visualising a style I wanted to replicate. I found out that after this time Tim had only just finished the final renditions of his lyrics and hadn’t yet perfected the sound or chords he would play them with on his guitar. This left me with only one choice but to carry on researching, analysing and planning locations so that I was ready to film exactly when Tim was finished. This was the reason we felt it was too ambitious to re shoot the balcony scene as there were too many time constraints in order for us to successfully plan, shoot and edit this scene again. Realising this has taught me how important communication is and is something I will definitely plan to improve on in the future.

My second research post aimed to develop my skills in editing and is what I produced in the time whilst Tim was still refining his songs. I spent a day practising by using the gimbal and getting shots of the city of Plymouth. I then emulated the editing style of JR alli and produced a three minute video which included in depth transitions and other simple masks to create a short piece which would be included as part of my research. I had some feedback from others and although they found this particular video edit more interesting than the live session videos, much more planning and construction was built around the live session in order to make the visual and audio aspects resonate perfectly with each other.

Overall I believe this project has been a success and I have worked very carefully in order to work around issues which were brought up throughout the course of the project.