Tuesday 16 October 2012

Porcelain Recreation Evaluation - Oh dear...

So I exported the final version of the Porcelain recreation today. It is terrible.

First thing I'm going to note: yes, this post is overly self-critical, even though I received a lecture about this kind of thing in Thursday's theory lesson. Reason? Because I would much rather reward myself exclusively for absolute perfection as opposed to settling for mediocrity.

I was supposed to be recreating a minute of this:


Instead, I spewed out this:


As the purpose of this task was to get a feel for how to go about creating the final piece I am going to look at each individual problem with this and hopefully highlight what I'd need to do differently in the final piece so it doesn't look like My First Final Cut Project in the way this... thing... does.

Cinematography
If we look at the eye shot which stays throughout the video, we can see one fault in particular: it looks like it was filmed with one of those Game Boy cameras from 1998. That's an exaggeration, but the point stands - the quality is really, really poor. I'm not sure whether this is down to the camera (the Bloggie) or the filming location (it was in my bedroom, which has poor lighting), but either way, it's something I need to work around.

The overlay shot, however, is of a good quality. This is probably because I resized it, so any blurriness the original had is not visible here.

Editing
Holy Arceus, I royally screwed this up. I can break this down into two significant problems:

1) The cutting away. Whilst in theory it would be possible to cut away at the overlay bit by bit so it looks like the eye is closing over it, it is not practically possible due to time constraints. It wants to render each time you make a cut - and when you only have about two hours with the Mac at a time this just doesn't work, so I took the easier choice and just cut it in and out roughly in time.

The result of this practice is that it looks absolutely AWFUL. It's like my head is just popping in and out randomly, which is completely out of place with everything.

2) Consistency, how does it work? Because I couldn't keep my head still in the eye shot, I've had to shift the overlay crop around at different sections in the video. It is highly noticeable, and it is WRONG. To avoid things like this I need to ensure that the cinematography is spot on to avoid having to use bodge-job editing techniques to work around it.

Honourable mention in the hall of failure: some of the lip-syncing if off. This only became apparent after exporting as the FCP window is fairly laggy.

Mise-en-scene
In regards to make-up: no, I am not wearing mascara or eye liner. Ever. At all.

Sound
At least the song is nice, I guess.

So yes, I believe this shall suffice for an evaluation for this absolute abomination to the art of music videos; I think it's fair to say I'm highly dissatisfied with the outcome of this. I need to step it up.

-HM.

2 comments:

  1. You're far too critical of yourself. You've done a really good job with the overlay. Even the timing of the blinks are pretty accurate. I am not quite so impressed by the eye spasms though! This is not really a technical criticism, but get control of your face, man. All you had to do was half close your eye at the right time... check it out at 27 seconds -- it looks as though your eye contorts from some kind of psychotic episode.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. ...but criticism is necessary for improvement, and thanks to my compulsive tendencies the errors stick out and it annoys me. But eh.

      I need to acquire new eyes for the final project. Any idea where I can find some?

      Delete