Our New GreenScreen

We all chipped in to buy a green piece of fabric which we will use our own green screen instead of borrowing the college's one.

Unfortunately we couldn't get a single piece that would meet our needs. Instead we bought two pieces of fabric, and sewed them together, creating an adequately sized screen.

This fabric, along with the thread used to sew it together, cost just under £15.00 in total - Coming to £3.75 per group member.

ROUGHCUT MUSIC VIDEO

This is our Roughcut video, uploaded to Vimeo.
It consists of the camera angles we plan on using at the particular moments of the song. However, we have not yet Chroma Keyed out the Green from the Greenscreen and composited the other band members onto the video.

We plan on getting more filming done between now and final editing to ensure we have exactly what footage we would like in our music video.

Contacting Butch Walker via Myspace/Twitter 2

As of Wednesday, 21 October 2009, we have no response from Butch Walker on Myspace. However, we now know that he has read the message.

We also have had no response from Butch Walker on Twitter, although he has been tweeting since our message to him so there is every chance that he has read that tweet, also.

Filming

So far, we have filmed successfully 3 times.
1. Conference room
This was our first greenscreen session that produced useful footage. We used a greenscreen cloth borrowed from another student, and filmed more Singing footage, as well as some of the Guitar footage. Half of one shot was lost, as the tape reached the end. 3 cameras were used, a college camera, Steve's and Helena's cameras, and this session is where the core of our filming took place.

2. Field
This was a in-lesson shoot, on the college playing field. We did this as we were asked if we had any other shots in our video other than greenscreen. Two shots were taken, A handheld shot folling the singer, and another handheld shot, held by Stu while he was singing. These shots are unsteady, and so it is likely little of these shots will be used.

3. Music Room
This was our most recent shoot, and focused on the drums. Still greenscreened, most of this shoot was used to film cutaways of the drums, as we were limited by music lessons in other rooms.

Also, we have attempted to film 2 unsuccessfully.
1. Outside
This shoot, although giving us footage, was unsuccessful as although it was goodfootage, it was difficult to cut out and chromakey as wind meant ripples in the greenscreen. This was our first shoot.

2. Tuesday
We attempted to shoot on tuesday, but we were limited as the conference room was unavailable and the greenscreen was in use.

Panorama Permission - incomplete

Due to the nature of the background and wanted flexiblity, I decided to use a Panorama as a base for this as I could technically have the entire background with 360 degree visibility easily, if the lighting is correct, without having to change anything.

However I did not have a desert to take my own a Panorama with, therefore I searched for one using Google. I found a suitable Panorama on TwoPennies blog, made by a few posters who had made a trip to the Red Rock national park previously and had
stitched together the photo of the park in a 360 degree panorama which was perfect for my uses.

I contacted him via his blog and he replied both in the comments section and via my email address.

3D background start - proof of concept

The song references "on a summer desert night", this is literally a work in progress desert scene to create a viable background for our music video, created with Modo using textures projected from a panorama which I found, and gained permission to use. The mountains are literally those on the left of the panorama.
This was rendered far too dark, with no real lights but using just the moon image and a starfield. Which meant I just increased the brightness in Photoshop for this picture to make it far brighter however in the future I can easily increase the brightness by simply changing the gamma value.

This is the current Wireframe, the sand, the original grassy heath which I will recreate at a later date and than the mountains in the background.

The moon and visible stars are both billboards placed behind the mountains as you can see by the two squares behind the mountain. There is a 3rd starfield in a sphere encircling the entire scene however it deforms the image and therfore visibly I replaced it. It however does light the scene. The moons and stars are currently the only light sources in this scene which drives up render times.
I will make heavy use of procedural textures as, my first attempt at sand is visible on the left, it is literally two bump layers (an illusion of depth) layed on top of each other to show both the graininess of sand and also the random variation of the surface of the sand.
Therefore the first layer to allow graininess is at a far higher resolution and set to add over the second layer which gives the sand shape.
It also has a base colour which has another layer of noise to multiply onto it to give it some variation.

It consists of no image map but is purely computer generated. I will use this technique where possible to limit the amount I need to gather.

Green Screen Testing and Set Up

Originally, we tried having the green screen sheet secured outside. We found this problematic for a few reasons.
The first of these problems being lighting issues, mainly the weather/position of the sun. To get good light on Stu, this meant that a shadow was cast on the greenscreen which meant the Chroma Key made it difficult to cut out.
The other problem was the wind. This meant the Green Screen was being blown a little and therefore the creases were obvious and hard to Chroma Key out.

Our second setup was inside (Using a different Green Screen Sheet). We found this to be a much better set up due to the matte lighting and on casting shadow.






After Chroma Keying out the Green we found that the inside set up worked much better.

Visit from Ed Lovelace on 7th October 2009

Former Long Road Media student Ed Lovelace gave a talk to the media students on Wednesday the 7th of October, he talked about his music videos and career path into the film industry.

After Long Road he went to study Video Production at Bournemouth University (2003-2005). After he finished his university degree he went to work for a production company in London named Pulse.

Now he has a production company called Daryl.










With the company Pulse, Ed Lovelace has produced a numerous amount of videos, including the ones below

'Ain't No Rest For The Wicked' - Cage The Elephant


'In One Ear' - Cage The Elephant

Both Cage The Elephant videos were filmed on a £40,000 budget.

'Abandon Ship' - Gallows


'Laser Hannon' - Cutting Pink With Knives

This video was filmed in just 2 hours! In someone's friend's basement, it was made to look like it was filmed all in one shot, however it was a "faked" one shot - with the use of pillars and walls as places for the shot changes to take place.

Contacting Butch Walker via Myspace

This is a screenshot of our message to Butch Walker through Myspace. The message is as follows;

"Hi, my name is Stuart Lowe and i am part of a A2 Media group studying at Long Road in Cambridge, UK. for our assessed piece we are presented a series of music tracks and asked to make a video. We chose your track "Paid To Get Excited", and as part of our task, we have been asked to contact the artist, with regards to ideas about the song. Any information on the song, such as inspirations or ideas regarding the video would be welcome.

Thanks,
Stuart."

Contacting Butch Walker Via Facebook

Along with our attempts to contact the artist of our song choice through Twitter, we have posted a comment on Butch Walker's Facebook page.

To the left is a screenshot of Butch Walker's profile page on Facebook, with Helena's post, which reads:
"Hello there! I'm a student at Long Road 6th Form College in Cambridge, and for our Media coursework we have to make a music video, and we picked one of your songs "Paid To Get Excited" and we would like to ask if you've got any tips or anything for us. I hope to hear from you soon. thanks :)"

Frazer's Favourite Music Video

This is more one of my favourite videos, rather than the favourite of mine, but it's simplicity is why I like it. The video to Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley was made in a single day. While this does not mean us four in this group will be able to create a quality video in a single day, neither do I expect this to happen, it does show that a decent video can be made in this short space of time. Another reason to why I like it is that as far as I'm aware it had a relatively low budget, showing that successful Music Videos can be made on a very limited budget, like ours will be.

As you can tell from this post, it's more about the details behind the video rather than techniques used inside of the video that makes me like it. Although, saying that, many of the various camera shots and angles used in the video to Never Gonna Give You Up are pleasing to the eye and work well, too.

Because this Official Youtube upload of the Music Video has disabled video embedding, the image below links to the video on the Youtube Website.

Steve's Favourite Music Video

I like this video due to both being a good song, and having very simple but effective animation which has a slightly nostalgic set drawings comprising the main animation. The animation is purely animated billboards (textured flat planes) to give the illusion of depth and a 3d environment. I especially like how it blends together between scenes/environments.

Stuart's Favourite Music Video

This is my favourite music video. I like it as it brings together band both a band performance with a video that tells a story. The video was inspired by all of the bands favourite films, including farmers and cowboys. The video is filmed in one long continuous take, progressing along the story on a guided camera track.

Contacting Butch Walker Via Twitter

With the use of the Twitter website, we have contacted the artist Butch Walker. His Twitter username is ButchWalker.
Due to Twitter limits (140 Characters per "Tweet" , including the "@Username" tag) we had to keep our tweets short while still asking what we wanted to ask him. We ended up having to Tweet twice to fit in what we wanted to say.

This is what we tweeted to Butch Walker:

FrazerJC @butchwalker My A2 group at Long Road 6th Form College have chosen your track Paid To Get Excited for our assessed piece. (Cont. Next Tweet)
FrazerJC @butchwalker ... If you have an tips about recording, as well as any thoughts you have about the song, we would appreciate your feedback. :)

This is also shown in the screenshot to the left of this post.

Song Lyrics - Paid to Get Excited

Below are the lyrics to our song choice, Paid to Get Excited.

And the sky is falling upwards on a summer desert night,
While kids in school are forced to sing the battle hymns just right,
Extras paid to get excited on the tv screen,
So doped up on diversions that they dont know what it means

To be free to hate the ones you hate,
Free to love the ones you love,
Free to like the land you live on,
Not the one who leads,
All I’m sayin’, dig the grave you lay in,
After all, you make the call,
Hang up before its too late

Make sure to give your full attention smile the best you can,
Watch this hand give peace sign while the other chokes a man,
Cuz he wants to love another man they’ll tell you that its bad,
Some book that set the moral codes is glamourized in ads

So be free to hate the ones you hate,
Free to love the ones you love,
Free to like the land you live on,
Not the one who leads,
All I’m sayin’, dig the grave you lay in,
After all, you make the call,
Hang up before its too late

And the backflipping, spike-haired preachers preaching through their headset mics
Saying god is the new elvis and he’s “gonna rock tonight”
So just sip on that new energy drink although it tastes like shit
Cuz a pretty t.v. couple says they cant live without it

Free to hate the ones you hate,
Free to love the ones you love,
Free to like the land you live on,
Not the one who leads,
All i’m sayin’, dig the grave you lay in,
After all, you make the call,
Hang up before its too late
Free to hate the ones you hate,
Free to love the ones you love,
Free to like the land you live on,
Not the one who leads,
All i’m sayin’, dig the grave you lay in,
After all, you make the call,
Hang up before its too late

Ooooooooh