Evaluation 4

How did you integrate technologies – software, hardware and online – in this project?

We actually started filming this project quite late compared to other groups, as we had to come up with a very well defined plan. While I personally enjoy a little planning and leaving the rest to improvisation in the heat of the moment, I felt that to create a product that really fitted Trap conventions while sticking out of the box, we had to make sure our plan was well-thought through.

A brief run through of the hardware we used:

Canon EOS 5D MkII
Canon EOS 70D
Dji Phantom 4
Tripod
Studio Lighting 4K Lights
24-70mm lenses
14mm wide lense
16mm wide lense
Macro lense
Rodes Microphone

Desktop PC - Intel i7 3.6 ghz 4 cores, GTX 960 2gb, 16 gb ram, 500 gb SSD, 1TB HHD.

Music Video

We chose the Canon EOS 5D MkII as our main camera to shoot with, as it was a standard for filming. The Manfrotto tripod was important and key to our dancing shots, as a lot of the camera movement came from attaching the camera to the tripod, but leaving the ball-swivel clamp loose, so while the camera can shake and tilt in a clean manner, the positioning is stationary.

 

 

For the studio, the biggest equipment we used were the 4k studio lights.

 

These were important in recreating a similar studio effect we were after in josh pan and X&G's music video of 'Platinum'.

 

We had a few bird-eye view shots  for the car scenes, and a few pan shots revolving around the car. We achieved this by using a Dji Phantom 4 drone. We faced a number of problems with this; We had limited battery life, we had to make sure we knew we wanted, and one of the locations we used is near an airport, so we were unable to fly it unless we wrapped parts of it in aluminium foil.

 

Software

The main 2 pieces of software we used for the music video is Adobe Premiere and Photoshop. Premiere was used for all the edits, cuts, arranging of the music video.

We ended up with around 50 different channels of videos, for the sake of seeing multiple possibilities when we were editing. However, the drawback from this was how hard the project file hit the performance of the PC we were working on. It was important to mention the specifications, because without them we would not have been able to work on the project. Late into the project we found that we were unable to preview and monitor what we were editing, as the software lagged too much to render.

Premiere was very useful in terms of being able to layer different footage together, such as the light leaks to create the flashing lights effect.

 

 

Photoshop was used to create all the animations and scribbles. The main problem we faced with this was the lack of a note pad to draw on. While we were very used to using a mouse, the process could have been faster otherwise, and the results would possibly have been better.
Here is a time-lapse showing the process.

The distortion effect presets came from Rocketstock, as we felt we did not want to focus our time on creating Premiere effect presets.

The light leak videos we used also came from Rocketstock

Digipak

We used Photoshop for the editing side of the product, and we used the Canon EOS 5D MkII for the front cover.

Here is an example of the process:

Website

We used Wix for our website, as it was a simple and free tool that allowed us to create a sleek and effective website that had just what we needed.