Construction Post 4: Music video post-production

We have spent the last few weeks of post-production completing our various main & ancillary tasks - arguably the most important of which has been the music video. I believe that it has gone very successfully, and despite us having to overcome several issues and incorporate a range of feedback, I feel that we have done so and produced a video which can be judged as plausible and of a high standard.

Our Premiere Pro workspace. The dual-monitors of the edit suite allowed us to edit and
view the timeline on one screen, whilst observing the progress of our final video on the other.

We kept two main focuses in mind when creating & editing our music video:

-The first was to create a conceptual narrative story via our Dolls House Setup, which was a visual response to the music (thus incorporated Carol Vernallis' theory mentioned in The Kindest Cut) and conveyed a message of female empowerment.

-The second was to create a visually interesting sequence which continued this message and possessed numerous of unique references to a series of moments in the history of feminism and female roles. (This intertextuality could incorporate Andrew Goodwin's theory in Dancing in the Distraction Factory).

Ever since we finished shooting our music video, and throughout the various construction weeks that have followed, we have been editing our video using Adobe Premiere Pro: 

Having used Premiere Pro not just for the music video, rough cut and steal-o-matic, but also for a range of projects over the last 3 years, I had absolutely no problems cutting, editing and grading shots; though I do feel that I have used new tools and effects, which have allowed me to consolidate and add to my post-production skills. The tools which I used are listed below:

-Render:

Whilst not being a tool as such, it was certainly absolutely vital to the progress of our project, as it confirmed and loaded any effects or changes to our shots so that we could play the video back in normal time. As a result, we could see what the exported version of our video would look like. (Please click the image to enlarge)

-Speed/Duration:

This was particularly useful to our sequence, as we were able to slow down footage which we had captured at 60fps to achieve a smooth slow-motion effect to add a 'big finish' to our Dolls House narrative. There was also the option to reverse shots, or speed the footage up (Please click the image to enlarge)

I have also listed a number of benefits of using the program to edit below:

Using effects:

(please click to enlarge)
Adjusting the RGB curves of
a shot. This enabled us to alter
the intensity of certain colours.

-Grading techniques:
This was an area in which I felt I definitely widened my skills. Having only used ProcAmp and the three-way colour corrector to grade before this project, it was a learning curve using levels and RGB curves to enhance the visuals of our footage. Whilst I didn't personally get to colour grade, I discussed and picked up the technique from Phoebe as she used it during colour grading.

Editing with Phoebe.

ProcAmp was used, as always, to adjust our footage's brightness, contrast, hue and saturation. Meanwhile, we were able to use both levels and RGB curves to enhance certain colours and increase the saturation of certain shots. This would prove to be hugely beneficial, as we encountered an issue that, despite re-shooting with less intense light, the Snow White setup's lighting illuminated Georgina in red. Using levels, we were able to toggle how intense the shade of red was in our footage, and thus reduce the effect of the red lighting on that setup.

(left) Adjusting levels     (right) after grading, on the left  vs   intense red lighting before

Grading, all in all, was hugely important to us, and helped to establish a particular aesthetic. In our case, besides correcting lighting issues from the Snow White setup, our choice to enhance colours using levels, as well as increasing saturation and brightness for a number of shots - particularly Dolls House shots - was a deliberate choice to easily connote a music video from the pop genre.

(left) Another good example of the benefit of RGB curves was in the puppet setup, where we

enhanced blues and greens to connote a 'colder' aesthetic. (left = after    vs    right = before)

(right) Using ProcAmp to enhance brightness and saturation.

-Video effects:

We also used a number of video effects under the 'motion' tab to change the position, scale and dimensions of shots. For instance, we increased the scale of some shots if we hadn't framed GiGi tightly enough, and to act as a zoom - though we had to be careful that the image quality didn't suffer too much. Meanwhile, we tilted other shots, such as some in the Dolls House, by -0.5°, to try and edit them to appear absolutely flat, as some shots seemed slanted.

 

(left) Using video effects to enlarge/zoom one of our rushes

(centre) The cross-dissolve. We placed it across two shots to fade into each other

(right) How we accessed the cross dissolve video transition

As well as this, we were able to use video transitions to enhance our sequence. Besides using a dip to black at the end of the timeline to follow the conventions of a number of existing videos, we tried using a cross-dissolve to merge some of our setups and add an aesthetically pleasing & interesting conclusion to our music video:

Feedback:

Some of the feedback our group
received from our media
technician and teacher.

We received a huge amount of feedback relating to our video throughout post-production. Georgina conducted lots of audience feedback, which has been displayed below:

-One of the most important during construction was with Biri, a member of our core target audience (as a 17 year-old female pop music fan) who said the following:

Positives:
-GiGi's continued purple colour scheme, and the vibrant colours in each setup.
-The patriarchal figure in the video represented by the male doll
-"Looked like a Meghan Trainor video": this is a huge positive for us, as it was one of our main reference points for content and aesthetic style.
-Georgina's characterisation, gesture and facial expressions.

(please click to enlarge)
Some further audience feedback
with Sofia: a 12-year old female
fan of the pop genre.

Negatives/Improvements:
-How she got into the Doll's House was unclear. Thus, we changed the shot order of the narrative sequence.
-Shots were often in large blocks, and there was enough shot variation for the various setups. As a result, we increased the amount of intercutting in the video, using more of the doll's house and performance setups to drive the narrative.

I also felt that the ending of the narrative sequence was slightly awkward, thus we also changed the ending of the doll's house sequence to make what unfolds clearer.
I have produced a snippet of our original narrative ending here:

Moreover, we also received feedback from our teachers and media technician - and myself and Phoebe completed any snagging needed, such as ensuring the lipsync was exactly in time.

As well as tailoring our video to the audience, we also had to face and overcome a number of problems with our edit, which I have listed below:

Overall:

On the whole I would say I am pretty pleased with how our video has turned out, and I believe that the hard work we all put in - whether it was editing, researching or inputting ideas - has resulted in a high-standard music video which incorporates theory and conventions very well. Whilst there are still some small issues which cannot be resolved, such as a lack of focus in some shots, and some lighting issues which cannot fully be ironed out, I think that it is still a product of our hard grafting over the last few weeks, and is a finished product we can be proud of, as has been reflected in a great deal of target audience feedback...