Production Diary Part 3

I have now filmed the green screen part for my music video, and let me tell you that I am regretting it now! Because I didn't get to use the green screen for my other filming it looks a bit silly just being against the fake gothic background I drew in Adobe Illustrator and then cutting to my characters in a nice green luscious garden setting, next to a river. I might have to go back there and film 4 minutes of a background plate to make it look like I was filming my parts there. Nothing has really gone to plan with this project, so been thinking while running a lot! Good experience, I suppose, but I would have liked something (or anything!) to go right during this final assessment. Having a nice finished product is lower on my list than actually finishing the project.

Have lots of work in Apple Motion lined up for me on Tuesday- so hopefully a rather large Zarraffa's coffee and a lot of self discipline will get me through. I have to learn how to chroma key in Motion, too. So that should be interesting. Final Cut Express does a decent job of keying surprisingly, but when I start to move and shadows come in and out of nowhere it leaves a little bit to be desired. Fantastic for when I'm not moving about, however! And I would recommend people get Final Cut Express and a Mac over Sony Vegas for PC for this reason alone. If Apple read my blog- Yes, I would love a copy of Final Cut Studio's latest incarnation. And perhaps a nice shiny Mac Pro. Not too much to ask, is it?! Thanks in advance.

At any rate, my song is 100% finished and I even entered it in the Q Song competition yesterday just minutes before the deadline! I also put Making Things Worse in the competition, too. Only after I spent 6 hours tweaking it to make the mandolin sound more in time since I no longer have a mandolin to play and couldn't record it again. Hopefully they will not notice all the timestretching I did to it...

Wish me luck for 10 hours of chroma keying on Tuesday. Or maybe just pop in with a nice steaming hot short latte for me. Cheers.

Production Diary Part 2

So, I have pretty much finished my song. I will probably do a few more edits and really tweak the guitars with EQ and compression and maybe throw a bit more distortion on them- even though I used a pedal to start with, because you can never have too much distortion! I also DO NOT USE ANTARES AUTO-TUNE. Therefore, I sound ever so slightly out of tune, because the human voice is not designed to be perfectly in tune like a sine wave. It is supposed to sound emotional, organic and beautiful. Which is hopefully what I have achieved. I think this is what I have achieved, at any rate.

I have also started editing the video portion of my music clip. This is sort of hard right now because I am missing over half of the footage I need- the parts where I play guitar and sing to the camera! Hopefully when that part is finished, life will be slightly easier in that regard.

Here's the more finished version with a rough mastering job done on it. I won't be posting a final mix until I put the entire video up here when it's completely done.

Production Diary: Part 1

Suppose I should start a blog diary for my final project at GCIT... It's been a bumpy ride to get here! I have shot half of my video and recorded the bulk of the song I am using for my Music Video Clip/MVC. The video turned out alright- bit shadowy in some places, but still usable.

I will upload some photo's when I work out how to get them out of iPhoto. In the meantime, hopefully this MP3 will upload so you can hear *half* of my song.