
2) What have you learnt from participating in each of the prelim tasks?
After that, the audition video we had to create in groups was the starting point of allowing ourselves to let loose and have fun. Being with friends while making fools of ourselves to a song really helped understanding what we needed to achieve as performers on the workshop day.
After roles were allocated, deciding costumes and planning everything was another aspect that we had to prepare prior to the day. From the planning, I learnt how important organisation is, and how important it would be that everything would need to be planned perfectly for my own music video to ensure a successful shoot.
As a dancer on the day, the importance of making the main characters and the others feeling comfortable on the day was extremely important in ensuring the shots would look good. As I wasn't needed for performance for most of the day, I tried making the main dancers comfortable enough to perform well in front of the camera.
3) Are you pleased with the footage and your edit? Is this how you expected it to look?
The footage looked professional and was close to the original. It was interesting to see that with a camera available to a consumer we could produce such high quality footage.
It was interesting to edit the footage as we never previously encountered lip-syncing and this experience helped me visualize the importance of over-acting to make sure the footage looked alright. We were warned that we need to dramatize our actions while performing so they looked normal on screen, and this applied to lip-syncing as well. Although expected, this also allowed us to understand that it's important to have many takes of the same shots to ensure you have the shot you need.
Some shots that we needed were missing, but we chose others shots and manipulated them by cropping and flipping to make sure they looked as close to the original as possible without ruining the quality. For example, only one shot with a boot existed, but there were many in the actual music video, so we had to change it so it didn't look the same everytime we used that shot.
4) How do you think your prelim experiences will impact on your approach to next term’s music video coursework?

It also helped me see that the confidence of an actor really helps portray the performance and it is obvious on screen if they didn't perform to their fullest. This will be important next year if we have choreography, but even generally it will be important to ensure confidence in all our actors.