Luke Curno - BA (Hons) Film : Practical Screen-craft Evaluation - 22nd January

Evaluation - Beauty Guru Video

Below is the instructional video that I filmed and edited within our group!

(refer to previous blogpost for images of teamwork)

Blog's Beauty Special - Go Pro Hero 4 from Luke Curno on Vimeo.

Initial Ideas for our instructional video

Looking back to the planning stages for our project, we were asked to create an instructional video to showcase the in's and out's of a piece of equipment that we have been inducted on throughout our practical screen-craft sessions. My group decided that we wanted to re-create a youtube video, similar to the product reviews and beauty halls that Zoella posts onto her channel, as well as many other beauty guru's.

Our idea consisted of getting two actors, like the ones that we are working with for another module, we had the intention of getting two actors from St. Mark and St. Johns called Chloe and Will. We wanted them to have a profile so we gave them two individual names for their personnel youtube channels i.e. "BlogsBeauty" and "SparklyHermaphroditexx". We had the idea of creating a spoof for a beauty hall video, where predominantly girls make a video to showcase their new purchases and give a product review, they try to sell the products to a wide audience. In this case the product would be a 'Go-Pro Hero 4 silver', the YouTuber's would talk about the Go-Pro, it's specifications, capabilities, what's inside the box etc.

What I thought worked well?

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Throughout this project, I had the role of being the cinematographer and editor, I worked closely together with everyone to ensure that everyone had an input, making sure that I could produce a product of a high satisfactory rate to the rest of my team. The background research that I carried out from our camera test shoot I think benefited the production as it not only helped with seeing the types of setting and camera shot's that could be achieved, it also lead to which camera that was chosen for the production (refer back to previous blogpost- more detail), which in this case was the Cannon XF100 as it presented a sharp and clear image. Also the decision on camera was based around how easy the settings were to operate, I played a lot with the zoom and focus within the shoot, adding movement to the video, gradual zoom worked well when the YouTuber was holding up the box, pointing to the settings on the back of the box.

Filming

Whilst in the cove, I thought that the lighting set up worked well, we managed to reposition the lights around the room to make our backdrop a lot lighter, allowing the actors to stand out. We managed to acquire a sofa for our set, as well as a scarf and fairy lights which I thought gave the set a really nice homely feeling, like the one that we were trying to achieve for our set design, originally wanted to film in someone's bedroom so we re-created the scene. We noticed a puf in the corner of the room which we positioned just in front of the camera, in the centre of where the actors were sitting, this acted well as a table for the Go-Pro box and accessory items to sit on, easily accessible for the YouTubers to pick up and talk about. Another element that I thought worked well was the camera, the tripod was easy to use, I was able to use the camera effectively, moving it around the room to achieve different angles, high, low just trying to experiment with the camera, using it to it's full potential. The cut away shots that I took worked really well to not only add different camera angles, mixing things up but it also helped to show the scale and settings on the box. After the shoot I decided to film the lights, pulling the frame in and out of focus to give a blurred effect, I then used this for the start of the video where the title comes up in squiggly writing and this gave a great effect.

Edit

I thought that my approach to the edit was fantastic, the way that everything was neatly labelled which made importing and cutting together a lot easier as I could locate under file names for the sound, music and footage. I like the way that I decided to create a rough cut of everything first, syncing the audio and footage together, making sure that the sound level's were even and that I reduced any peaks in the level of noise. Again, I thought that the cut away shots were edited together nicely, making sure that the movements of the box linked on from each other, as well as giving the zooms that I did on camera a slower movement and transition to add to the elements that I found via my background research. Also, during my research I picked up on the way that the beauty videos are edited, the footage cuts quite quickly, I think that my re-creation of this worked well, not to mention that it made the video length shorter. While sat down with the edit, I decided to keep glancing at the script and listened to the words in the footage as it helped me to decide when everything needed to be cut together and I could then use extra cut aways to fill in the spaces of parts where the two YouTubers are talking to each other. The last things that were added onto the video was the music which I though worked really well, sounded like a YouTube beauty video, I also thought that the title and credits worked well as myself, Janusz and Danielle thought about using a girly text, much like the ones that Zoella and other Beauty Guru's use for their hall videos.

What I thought didn't work well?

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I thought that the idea was achievable which is a good way to think as a cinematographer, but I thought that the research into ideas for songs on the video didn't go well, as I didn't listen to this sort of music, I had an idea of what I was looking for but I just couldn't find many royalty free tracks, in the end myself and Dan teamed up to talk about the types of music tracks we wanted, ukelele came up in the discussion quite a lot which is why we have chosen a fast tempo tune with a high melody, chimes, dings etc.

Filming

I think that the equipment and the location could have been booked a bit more in advance, we only had an hour booked for the cove but I wondered up to see if their wasn't anyone in the cove when we got there early so luckily we managed to get another hour which was well needed by the time that we had set the camera up, created the set, actors had got ready etc. Due to the background noise on the boom audio, I felt like there should have been more than 1 test for the sound in the room before we started recording, I did mention to do a test but perhaps we could have done with a few more.

Edit

I really struggled with the background noise that had been picked up on the boom mic, it sounded like one of the lights was buzzing in the cove, I started to play around with the audio gain and speed/duration but it wasn't working, in the end I managed to add an effect onto individual pieces of audio, used an effect called "DeNoiser" which worked exceptionally well to decrease the background sounds, like it almost got rid of the hideous buzzing noise. I had a slight problem in a few places where the audio peaked, I didn't know whether to remove them and stitch the clips back up to see how it worked, or whether to permanently delete the footage as well, in the end I tried both but they weren't working so I shortened the whole clip, whilst making sure that everything was still factually correct.

What I think that we could change for future productions?

I would definitely benefit from transferring all the footage to everyone in my group so that they too could have a go at the editing side if they wanted. However, myself and Dan sat down for a few hours to work on the edit, once he had transferred the music over too me. Perhaps we could book the cove out for the shoot as well as the camera equipment a lot sooner in order to make sure that we have the room, all we will have to do then is bring the equipment, point and shoot. I think that I would like to actually film part of the video on a Go-Pro since that is the product that the YouTuber is trying to sell, what better way than to show it's capabilities and quality of the megapixel camera than through a series of shots taken with the specific product that i.e. a Go-Pro Hero 4 Silver.

Thinking about the sound, I think that it might be a good idea to have two sets of recording so I might look into the possibility of putting a road mic onto the camera so that we can have that recording sound whilst the boom can pick more directional sounds like the talking, unboxing, rustling of packaging etc.

Conclusion

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed working on this project, I think as a team we worked well together, Danielle as the director helped myself with the shots whilst filming and provided a script, Janusz as the location scouter managed to book out the equipment and location for our shoot, myself as the cinematographer and editor who worked hard to create a piece of work to fit everyone's satisfaction within the group and Dan as the sound man and lighting, even though we didn't use much additional lighting, Dan helped me and Janusz to reposition the lights in the cove and he found a perfect music track to give the video that last push at becoming a beauty guru video.

I think that I operated the camera successfully as the cinematographer using the Cannon XF100's different features to film with, also I feel that I was great at editing the video together including the sound, footage, music and title's/credits.