Evaluation of Group task music video

As a mini-project, we worked in a group of 6 to deconstruct and reconstruct 30 seconds of a media text, which because of our chosen brief was a music video (we chose Ed Sheeran - The A Team). The group of 6 were me, Ruby Dearness, Aimee Bant, Chloe Carroll, Jodie Gibson and Abbie Hastings. We chose this specific music video out of our group because it had various different shots and we had the ability to learn how to edit with the new media software as our video had high contrast and was in black and white. I think if we were to do this project again we would definitely focus on a video which had lip sync in and more quick shots to improve our skills for our later project.

We reconstructed 30 seconds of the music video which we chose to be 20 seconds in as the first 20 seconds had a lack of editing and was just one shot. Firstly, as a group we watched the music video and decided what kind of setting we were going to use and when we would have time and all of the group to shoot sand edit, we decided on times when we all had study periods and when we could all get together at lunch, because we knew that more time means more ability to get it right and not have to rush. I think as a team, we organised our self concisely and i think this was a major strength of the success of our project. 

We set up a production schedule, and made sure we stuck to this, especially because we had a limited time. Chloe had the video on her phone so when we were filming we could compare the shots on the video to our shots and to make sure the timing was correct for every shot. I think one thing we could have improved on is making sure we made use of the video storyboard so we didn't have to rely on the video - a lot of the time it didn't work and we spent a lot of time waiting for the video to load. 

After we had filmed every shot, we had a lot of time left for editing so we took advantage of this. We let Ray talk us through the different techniques we could use as he had knowledge on how the editing system and when he left us to our own accord, we decided to look at how we could best duplicate the Ed Sheeran music video with the editing, as it had a strong black and white effect with no grey and a strong contrast. I think it was good that we had a lot of time left for editing because we didn't have to rush.

We had to name each shot which took time and patience and then placed this on the editing timeline, we then cropped down the shots to best copy the video and making sure we stuck to the timing of each shot. We then used the black and white contrast technique then changed this so the contrast was slightly higher and black and white was stronger - this differed between shots as some shots had quite a white background.

After we had editing, we asked Ray to export the video, and by then we had a final music video. I think if we were to do this all again, we would most definitely choose something more complex for more of a challenge, aswell as something with more props and more use of mise en scene, maybe even something more abstract.