2. What have you learnt from participating in each of the prelim tasks?

Audition
Doing the audition taught me the basics of lip-synching, i.e. actually singing rather than mouthing the words, and also the basics of performing to a camera, ensuring to maintain a direct address. One of the things I found most challenging about the audition was coming up with different angles to film and different ideas for shots, as it was such a small window of time, but we managed to do a few. The editing was harder due to the limited amount of time to watch clips, choose the best ones and edit them together properly, but this taught me to ensure that we storyboard our music video next year.

Learning and practicing the performance
Practicing the performance helped me to realise the importance of rehearsals, as it showed me the improvement that occurred after having practiced movements, gestures and facial expressions, ensuring that we were aware of key things to practice once we went home. It also developed my performance towards a camera, again prompting direct address, but also making me think more about the little details of my movement and facial expression, as these would show up clearly on camera.


Planning and Organising costumes
Adapting costumes, compromising but still keeping to the theme
Planning and organising costumes has taught me that this is one of the most important aspects of working on a shoot, as it ensures that composition will be correct and that the look of the video and characters will fit with what they are meant to look like. However, this has taught me that you can compromise and adapt with costumes, for reasons such as lack of availability or actor discomfort, and the video will still be able to retain its' look.

Here, I did not have a long sleeve black t-shirt, so it was adapted to a short sleeve one.

Shoot
Looking around at all of the paperwork on the walls helped me to understand the level of organisation that is needed on a pro-shoot, but the day itself taught me that these schedules can be changed, as it was when doing re-takes at the time of filming rather than at the end of the day.

Going up to the lighting box taught me about the different ways you can setup the lighting, how to control it, and how to save these lighting setups as pre-sets for easy reference in future. This will be very useful next year if we use the studio. (See above, the photography lighting and the white scene lighting)

Edit

At some points, movement was more important, i.e. the yellow shots, but during the performance lipsynching was prioritised. Grading was also slightly difficult on some of these shots, as if colour correction was applied, then skin colour would be affected, but if not then colours were off. We decided to minimise colour correction as we thought it looked better without it.

Editing the prelim video together was quite a long process, as at first we went through shot by shot, but then realised it was quicker to go through and place shots by setups rather than shots. We also created a performance bed for the white scenes, and placed other setups on top of that so that the white scenes would always be in time and also require no further work to place at different stages of the video. One thing that I learnt from trying to sync the lipsynchs/movement was that listening to the sound of both the recording and song helped when there was lipsynching, but with movement I found it better to synchronise the visual movement so long as there was no lipsynchs.