Essay on Lip Syncing exercise

In deciding what song we were going to do for our Lip- Syncing task we first decided that we wanted to choose a light and up beat song, something  in the Pop genre.  We chose this because we felt this genre would be quite fun to do and we knew it would be more likely that we would all know the song. After much research looking at different songs and music video's, we chose Girlfriend by Avril Lavigne because it fit the criteria we had set and had comedic elements.

 We also chose this song because we decided we could use our school setting as a good location to shoot and with this match the shots accurately. To help plan exactly what we were going to have in each shot we watched the video multiple times and did a storyboard pausing the video every time the shot changed and also, for more accuracy, did a screen shot of every shot in the music video.

For the actors in our video we used friends and volunteers from our sixth form, because it then meant we could create large groups of people for the shoot in which they walk in and we could use the same people for the main characters as we could fit when we shoot around times best for them.

During the production of this exercise we played the original video to all the actors to help them understand what they are aiming to recreate, we also broke it down in to the specific shots we would be shooting at that time and then whilst actually filming played the song so we could exactly time the actor mouthing the words to the singing of Avril on the recording.

To accurately match the content our shots to the shots of the video we varied camera angles and shots particularly in the fifth shot where the camera follows them round a corner but is at the same level as the previous shots. So we had to keep this in consideration and attempt some practise shots to get the accurate position of the camera that meant we could turn all the way round. For the same reason we created similar outfits to the outfits worn in the videos as well as finding wigs and using make up to make them as similar as possible.

To finish the task we used Imovie to import the clips from the camera onto the computer and then into Final Cut express which we used to precisely edit to form the final product we also unlinked and linked the audio to have the actual song with the clips. I feel this skill will be of particularly value when we  come to actually editing our coursework because we will be able to match the music and visuals very accurately. This is also the case with using final cut express as it meant we could change the speed of some clips and precisely cut clips to exactly match the singing.