Evaluation of Filming and Editing

Our music video consists of stop motion plasticine models throughout with a short sequence in real life. With the models being constructed of plasticine there have been many problems that we have had to face while creating our finished product.
The first hurdle that we had to overcome was lighting. If we wanted our box that we would be animating to be well lit we would have to use lamps, these lamps created alot of heat and we found that it started to melt the plasticine after a while making the figures deformed and we found them hard to manage and move around. We overcame this by lighting our box with the natural light from the media room and also fair lights that we poked through the back of the cardboard to look like stars.

There were various parts throughout filming where we had to zoom into our models face and into other objects in the scene the first way we tried it was by zooming in a small amount and then taking a picture every time we moved closer. We played this back to ourselves and we realised that it was a bit too jumpy. To improve the look of our zooms we changed the method instead of doing it slowly we zoomed in slowly and not stopping and while one person was zooming another was taking picture after picture really fast to make a smooth zoom.
The editing of the video didn’t always fit in with the music as various different parts of the stop motion filming had different amounts of frame. To solve this so that the video will fit in with the music we have sped up a few of our shots and also some of them we have had to slow down so that certain actions and events are parallel with the particular line.
The movement of our figurine is very stiff and in a particular part of the video we have to have him moving his head to the side to watch a car drive by. First we just tried detaching his head and then moving it round but this caused his head to fall off, we next tried putting a pin into his shoulders and then using that to pivot the head on this worked a lot better and looked more realistic.

We also have many different things that need to move and float as if by themselves we have done this by using fishing wire which looks invisible on the camera.
There have been many problems to overcome but they have all been solved very simply and are very close to finishing our final cut.