Evaluation of skills learnt.

Planning
For my planning I firstly learnt how to successfully lip sync in case I was assigned a role that required me to 'sing' for the preliminary task. This will be helpful when I create my own music video, as I will have to teach the people in my music video how to convincingly lip sync to the chosen song, to ensure that my music video looks professional. I then made a storyboard of the video we would be imitating, Busted - What I Go To School For, analysing the shot used in each scene, who was in the scene (aka. which band member or cast), props that were in the scene, the duration of the scene and what part of the song/lyrics were playing in the scene. This was extremely helpful when it came to editing our footage, as it made it easier to see where we should place our footage to mimic to sequence of the song, and ultimately saved time on the editing process. Next we assigned roles to members of the class, so that everyone had a job to do in the production of the filming, meaning everyone knew what they had to do and when. Because of this I think we worked well as a team and were very focused on the task, therefore managing to shoot some scenes in one take. After this we went through a practice run of all the scenes involving the teacher in the video and created a seating plan, which meant we already knew where the camera needed to be placed for the scenes and where everyone was sitting. This allowed us to shoot the teacher scenes fairly quickly, the whole point of the practice run, as the person assigned to the role of the teacher wouldn't be present for the other lessons. In hindsight, I think that it would have been better to choose someone else to take to role of the teacher, because some shots weren't long enough due to the camera fading at the beginning and end, and we couldn't re-shoot the scenes because the person wasn't there. This also created a continuity error, as the person playing the role of Matt drops a pencil on the floor, but in the next scene the teacher picks up a pen.
Overall, I think that the planning of the video was well prepared, and it helped us to be more efficient in the stages of production and editing, as well as minimising the amount of continuity errors. However, I think we spent a little too long on going through the teacher scenes before we filmed them, as we could have used that time to film them as well.

Production
The filming of the video took around three lessons to complete, the first lesson dedicated to the teacher scenes, the second lesson to the rest of the interior shots and the third lesson to the outside scenes. The fact that we bunched together the similar scenes to film, rather than filming the video in sequence to the original, was a good idea, as there wasn't much moving around and time wasting that there would have been if we had followed the sequence of the video. Everyone came in clothes suitable and similar to those of the cast in the original music video, and only three people wore different ties to everyone else, but was still a continuity error.     Most of the scenes we filmed were done quickly and efficiently, usually in one take, only those that required lip syncing and timed actions were re-shot, more than twice, to ensure that the movements would coincide with the song. I think this was a good thing to do because although it was sometimes tedious and took a while, it ensured that ultimately the video would be as close to the original as possible and would also look professional. During the filming only two people were in charge of the camera at one time, one person to set everything up and film the scene and the other to check that the scene was as shown in the music video. This meant that the shots were as close to the music video as they could be, because the two opinions gave a better reliability. Having two people operate the camera also meant that there wasn't a group of people crowding around the camera to check how everything looked and consequently wasting time. The only problem we encountered during the production was when we were filming the outside shots. We were filming next to the passageway to the library and there was an exam going on that day, so we frequently had to wait for people to walk behind us to go to their exam before we could start filming again. To counteract this we could have moved to a different location.
In general, I think that the production of our video went quite smoothly and we shot all the scenes we needed for the video, most of which were of a good quality. Unfortunately, we only had a small number of people in the class and this means that in the classroom scenes there are different people in different seats throughout, s problem we tried to avoid by scouting for people.

Editing
The process of editing the video took about two lessons. We worked in pairs to create our own video which worked well, as when one person wasn't in for the lesson the other could carry on with the editing. The software we used for editing was iMovie, which was simple to use. The hard part of the editing was making sure that the footage of the 'band members' was in synchronization with the lyrics of the song, which meant that some scenes at the beginning of our video had to be cut shorter so that the person in the role of Charlie was singing the lyrics at the right moment. Some of the filming wasn't too good and that made it hard at times to edit it to get the part we needed for the film, but it was manageable. We also used the effects to darken the scenes which were shown to be in the dark in the music video, meaning we kept the detail from the filming but darkened it successfully to look like it was filmed in the dark.
On the whole, the editing was simple and completed quickly, though at times frustrating when trying to get the music and visuals to coincide together perfectly. I was happy with how the video turned out in the end and think the editing in it was very good.

In conclusion, the process of creating the video was successful. The planning was extremely useful throughout the whole procedure, especially in the editing. The production was carried through professionally and we had shots of every scene in the video, and some extras meaning we had a choice of which shots to use for certain scenes. The editing was easily done and I think that the finished product looked successful and was as close to the original music video as we could have possibly made it.