Analyzing my preliminary task

I do feel that the overall outcome of my preliminary task is well managed. There are a number of good points to the video, as well as there also being a large number of parts that I would change and will learn from next time.

The video itself has produced a good result, and it is watchable, which is more than i thought it would be when we had finished. I think that we chose some really good songs, and the video has a humorous side to it, which I think is a good thing to have when showing it to other people.
One major lesson I have learnt from this project is how I should stand the camera's next time, as you can see from a number of parts throughout the video, the picture is quite wobbly, and does not look very professional, therefore we should have used a tri-pod more often than we did to get a clearer picture and a more stable image. This will make the video easier for us to watch as well as making it simpler for me when videoing.

Lip-syncing is a huge part of the video making and in parts of this video, it is not very well matched. I found that it was very hard to match the lips with the music perfectly, in fact it was a lot harder than i was expecting it to be. If the lip-syncing is out then the entire video looks awful. Therefore when choosing actors/artists for my next video I should make sure that they are very well pronounced with a lot of confidence, as that way they will be more confident when videoing.
As I have never used the software before I was very uncertian about how it worked, therefore a lot of my time was spent exploring the software or asking other, more experienced users how to work it. For example, I spent a long time working out how to mute the sound from the video when the music is playing, but as you can see I soon discovered, that in order to do this you must cut the exact part of the music that you require and place it on the storyboard, as well as cutting the same amount in the video that is in sync with the music. Then once this has been cut, I had to right click and find volume, therefore lowering the sound completely. At some places in the video this has been done very well, but in others, either the clip has been cut too early/late, the music has been cut too early/late, or they are not in time.  This has made me think more carefully about what song I should use for my music video, as I do not want to be using a song that is too quick and the words can not be very easily heard/seen.

The mise-en-scene in a number of these clips is not very well constructed, for example in 'The Candy Shop' scene, there are clothing rails and buckets in the background, this does not go very well with the image I am trying to put across and the same goes for a few of the other clips. I should have thought about where the camera angles were, where I was going to stand and where I was going to have the actors stand to gain the best shot before I begun filming.

Another serious issue that I must ensure that I check before I film next time is lighting, in a few shots the lighting is irregular and this does not help with the overall image. In some cases, the light may be over exposed and we are unable to see everything clearly, and in others the light is too dim and we cannot see everything that we need to.
I feel that the editing and cuts between each clip has not been done very well and the general 'flow' of the video is not very good, it is very jumpy and it shows that the video has been done to a lower standard. I'm sure that when I begin to understand how the software works a bit better, I will work out how to make these transitions look better and more professional. For example using different effects and transitions would have helped the video to go easier and would have also made it easier to watch as apposed to the jumpy way it does now.

So frustrating!

One huge problem I have found with the school software, is that it tends to crash a lot. I began to analyze my video and believed that when I logged off at the end of the lesson, everything I had written had been saved. However, as I found when I logged back on again on my own computer, the work I had previously done, has been lost. This is frustrating and a waste of time. I really hope that this does not happen when it comes to creating my real music video.