Evaluation

Evaluation
I really enjoyed this as I found that I prefer to do moving images rather than interactive designs. This is becuase I find it more interesting and it has a more practical side too, such as actually going out and doing the work rather than always being sat in front of a computer all the time, getting the same thing over and over again. If you actaully go out and record then you’re “getting your hands dirty” so to speak and this is what I love about it. I realise you will have to sit at a computer to edit and put it together but at least its not for the whole duration of the project.
Having worked with my own band and done the recording myself I have come across many pros and cons of which i found the pros tend to cancel out the cons. For example, filming your own band means that you have to find somewhere to shoot the film and record different parts. As it so happened we have a practice room at our bassists house and practice there on a regular base, so luckily we had somewhere to shoot. At first I wasn’t too happy with it because it wasnt very professional looking but when I came to editing it I found that the room was actually okay because the background almost faded away. We did 3 different shoots in three weeks. This made things abit awkward as not everyone could make it and that meant we couldn’t do any recording. We did about 7 different shots and then did some individual filming of the band and then some group ones. I found out that the individual ones worked best and made more of an impact. On the second shoot we managed to get a smoke machine as we had been trying to fill the room up with cigarette smoke without success to gain this sort of effect. The only bad thing about using the smoke machine was when it came to the drums you couldn’t see the drummer and thats probably the only thing I really don’t like about the music video, the fact that I don’t have more shots of the drummer.
When it came to the editing of the video I was going to originally keep the shot of the vocalist in colour and the rest off the band members in black and white, but then I added a threshold filter of it which made them black and white - then it was bit mapped but I soon was able to figure out how to change it.
I think that I have stuck to my original story board fairly well but with a few small changes for example the strobe light on the drums and the circle head banging. I couldn’t find a strobe light so I decided not to have one, but again when it came to editing this I managed to find another useful and powerful filter which is used in other metal videos to make the viewer experience the power of the riff or whatever it is that is being portrayed. This filter moves the images/film around and adds a flashing effect to the video, which I used to make the brutal and faster parts have more emphasis. Another bit that I didn’t do was the bottle smashing in slow-motion but instead I used slow-motion for doing the head banging becuase it works really well with the hair going all over the place and adds that little bit more to the video.
Also with these effects the smoke from the smoke machine worked really well and had this eerie effect to add to the film, sort of a film noir thing.
If I was to go back and do this again with more time I think that I would have filmed in more locations such as filming the band in the moors or some fields and on top of a rock formation. I would of added some epicenes in there, with the wind blowing in our hair and letting out mighty blast beats and awesome riffage!
Also I think I would put more shots of the drummer and of used less smoke on these shots because as he is sitting down you can hardly see him and then to add smoke to the shot means even less footage of him!