Critical Reflection

A level critical reflection.

Special exclusive for fans!!!!

Fans can now get our new digipack on our website 

http://haematic.my-free.website/editor.

The digipack includes Psychopath album with ink blot CD 

design, and a Haematic tour date poster signed by the band. 

Serial Killer by Hemanic

Its finally here, Hemanic's brand new music video for their song Serial Killer.

Serial Killer music video

You can check out more about Hemanic's music on our website.

Putting it all together

As I put more and more time into the video I realized the work that comes with making a music video. My worst problem was trying to match what Haley(the one singing on camera) was lip singing and the words to the actual song. It proved to be a tedious task that made me want to bang my head against a wall, it some cases I would only have to adjust 3 or 4 times but then there were other scenes that I had to adjust 8 or 9 times. A lot of shots also had to be color corrected and or put into slow-motion or moved around until it fit in best with the lyrics and helped the story be told. Audio was a breeze and a lot 100x to edit then the film opening because there is no dialog or sound except for the music which makes audio so much easier.

Website and Digipack

We began to finalize everything for our website and digipack today and I'm really excited to see how how everything comes out, we first used google sites but were not satisfied with the way it was coming out so we changed to WebsiteBuilder and fell in love with the layout Imma ,one of our group members, created. As one my group members worked on that we began to think about ideas for the album covers and ideas for the digipack. Our albums name is psychopath and we wanted our cover to be strange but attract all kinds of audience, we wanted something not used before or seen a lot. One of my group member coma along a picture of a ink blot test and from there we all need that we wanted something like that for our cover. We thought it would work perfect with the name of our album and still be really different. 

Editing a Music Video VS. A Film Opening

From the beginning I came with the knowledge that editing a film piece and a music video would be different from each other but I didn't think it would be like complete opposites. When editing the film it was easier in the sense that I basically followed the storyboard shot by shot adding in an extra one here or there. But with the music video it's completely different I have total freedom which is really nice but at the same time overwhelming because theres so many directions I can go and and so many ways I can piece it together thats it makes it difficult to choose. I don't if I like one more then the other because I like editing both because they are so different and I can have fun with each and make it my own in the end.

Roadblocks

With the project almost due my group has been in high gear working to get everything done fast but well, we multitask each working on a part of the project. Our biggest problem and concern is filming we still have shots that need to be film but we can't seem to be able to find a time to film or get together. As worried as I am I know my group and I can get it done as long we work hard and put everything we have into each part of the project tonight we are supposed to film the rest of the shots and go over all together the other parts of the project we've been working on separately. I'm confident that we can get everything that we plan to do tonight done and be able to have our project come out as good as the last one.

Finding the right song

It took my group and I about two weeks to find the song we wanted to use, we wanted a song that would continue the creepy and suspenseful feeling our film opening had. We were set on a slowed down version of Happy by the Turtles that was played in the film The Great Gatsby, but after hearing the song multiple times we couldn't come with an idea for the video. At the moment we hadn't decided on what type of video we wanted to make promotional, story telling, or artistic we talked about maybe combining story telling and artistic and the song just wasn't working with us. We knew we wanted the video to make viewers uncomfortable but still interested, so we began the hunt again for a new song that would fit our vision. In the end after listening to countless songs we came across Lana Del Ray's Serial Killer. The lyrics itself were creepy and gave us the idea of showing obsession in a girl's point of view. We didn't wanna to base it off a girl stalking a boy because we didn't want to duplicate our film opening so instead we chose to show the insane obsession a girl develops after just bumping into a boy. From that moment we were able to storyboard most of the song and get an idea of what the video was going to be. Below is a link to the lyric video of the song.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlf9e9PnJZM

Behind the scene exclusive

Check out 31S again but this time with the producer's commentary on why and how 31S was created.

Or read the written commentary.

31S

Here it is our film opening 31S. 

Directed by Imma Van Der Walt

Produced by Karina Buitrago

Haley Harding staring as Katy

Alvaro Olvera staring as Mark 

Editing and putting everything together

My main role in our whole process is edit, since I’m the most experienced with it in our group.  From the beginning the one of the hardest things for all of us was choosing which clips to use, we loved all of them and if we had more time we would have used almost all of them. One way i did try to incorporate many of our shots was by sequencing when i could and using multiple POVs of the same shot. Another struggle we had was figuring out how we wanted to include the titles, we didn't wan them to take up time that we could use for something else that would add to the story. Our solution was to have them all in the very beginning dissolving in out and quickly layered along with shots of Mark's (the stalker) room. The titles begin to the intensity and the shots help establish the background. 

To the right is a screen shot of the sequence workspace in Adobe premiere pro, you can see  the titles(pink) are layered on top of the shots each having a dissolve transition on the beginning and end of the clip. I tried to dissolve each one a certain way to not match the music but go along with it instead. And as I continue editing I like how it is coming along when it doesn't match the beat right to the point. 

First day of filming

On Sunday March 15 we spent the entire day from 2:00 pm till 10:00. We began at town center near the business offices to film the scenes where they see each other at work. We filmed the same shot about 7 to 12 times shooting in different angles and capturing shots to build sequences. I did that with many shots to be able to to have more variety and more perspectives, instead of having plain old medium shots. My role the whole day was filming, we used a professional camera and tripod I have used many times and using my knowledge and experience from filming I was able to show our stalkers thoughts in a newer perspective.

This was the scene we started with, we had our group members act for us and dressed them up to look like older adults in their late 20s/ early 30s.  The hardest part about filming this scene was the lighting, it was very sunny at the time we were filming and it made it darker by the door that was under a covering. So when they would walk from the sun into the shaded area I had to adjust the iris quickly but not too fast that the audience would be able to obviously notice. Lighting in general was a big issue we dealt with especially in the night scenes.  We needed our shots to be lit but we wanted it to still seem eerie we used flashlights and the light on our phones to light up Alvaro's face.

Our final idea

All through out last week we bounced different ideas off of each other for our film opening back and forth not coming up with any thing we liked. Until Alvaro one of our group member came up with an eerie suspenseful idea for a plot involving a stalker. 

We began to storyboard our ideas for shots then came up with a solid plot line to put them all together. Our goal is to make the viewer super uncomfortable when watching our video we want them to cringe and be spooked. We agreed that we should use a lot of ECUs (extreme close ups) to make things more intense and also get multiple OTS (over the shoulder shots) to get different perspectives on what's going on in the stalkers mind. We wanted to film more shots then we would need so we could have a variety to choose from when editing. Our plan was to film Sunday from 12:00 pm till 7:00 pm.

New Day, New Idea. Whole new opening

As my group and I came to class again today and began to get into more detail about our comic book opening we began to see some problems. We thought there was a huge risk of the opening turning out cheesy. As we thought about ways we could modify and improve it Alvaro remembered a song and pitched an idea around the song. The song he thought of was an eerie slowed downed version of Happy Together by the turtles that was in the Great Gatsby movie. He pitched that we throw away our other idea away completely and start anew with a more suspenseful thriller about a stalker and his obsession with a girl that doesn't even know who he is. We started thinking of all different scenarios we could do. We wanted to make our viewers uncomfortable but engrossed in our opening we wanted to have dark shots, close ups and extreme close ups to make everything much more intense. We wanted our first shot to be the stalker singing the song lowly ,and creepier like then the version we thought of, and be in a dark room full of photos of the girl and on one of the pictures you would see the the movie title and the opening would continue from there.

Coming up with our film opening idea

 
As my group and I started brain storming we didn't really know where we wanted to start. We began naming things we liked and disliked about film openings to try and see what we would want our to be like. We then began thinking backwards and tried coming up with a story line first thinking it might be easier that way. Ideas started to pour in when one my group members mentioned a flip book concept. From there we began forming a storyline and the way we wanted to start the opening. I imagines in my head how i would edit it together knowing the amount of key framing  i would need to do to have our vision come true. We wanted out opening to start our with a little boy holding a comic book and as he opens it the shot changes to the pages of the comic. From there the shot would zoom into the boxes and video would start playing and once it ended the shot would be moved to another box and the same thing would occur. the videos would go into the background of our main character. As the shots would continue there would be a voice over narrating and at the last box the animation would change and the shot would go to the main character in the real world.