How did you use media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?

We actually didn’t use any green screen for our video because we thought it usually looks quite amateur with the type of cameras we use. Most people usually use green screen when doing some sort of performance e.g. lip-syncing or dancing, but we didn’t have any lip-syncing and only one short dance sequence (Mohammed freestyle dancing in town). Furthermore we thought it’d be innovative to have no green screen and simply use real locations for all our scenes.

We didn’t really use any special camera techniques; as most of our filming was done handheld. The closest thing that came to special equipment we utilised was a steadicam. We used this when filming the long, sped up close up of Mohammed walking down fourteen flights of stairs. This was used to mimic the snorricam effect where the camera is attached to the body of the actor, facing them directly so that when they move, it appears as if only the world around them is moving, but their head stays in one position. To achieve this, Mohammed had to hold the camera out straight ahead so it was facing him and walk down the stairs, all the while keeping his arms as still and straight as possible. The camera was attached to the steadicam to ensure little shakiness.

We did use a tripod, though rarely because we had a lot of shaky tracking shots. The only smooth, non-wobbly shots we did were the one where my character makes appearances at the start and end of the video, and where Mohammed’s characters walks out from the darkness up to the camera with a mobile phone light in his hand, illuminating his face. We wanted that shot to appear is if he has something glowing in his hands, which I hope we achieved.

The most common editing transition in our video wasn’t the ‘cut’, it was a sped up version of the ‘cross zoom’. That is what creates the bouncing in and out effect. The reason I chose this was because, if cut to the beat (which I did) it can make long tracking shots less boring. You could have a five second tracking shot, then, after putting in a few cross zooms, it doesn’t seem too long. Also, in my opinion, cutting all the way through with no other transitions would look quite dull, especially with the track we had.

I inserted a lot of video filters in our video to improve the footage. The earthquake filter caused the frame to vibrate and shake, as if the cameraman (which was me) couldn’t hold the camera steady, which is what we wanted. We used that effect on most of the stable, tripod shots as we wanted to show that the protagonist was feeling under pressure throughout most of the video.

Another one of the filters I used was the bloom effect, which increased the brightness on any lights in the shot. This made the world around the protagonist seem more threatening with large angry lights blazing all around him. Moreover, it looked good.

I did a lot of speed level changes to a lot of our shots, as that is what you get in a lot of music videos these days. Also, high speed shots went well with our track, as the song itself had a very fast paced beat.