Reflecting on the new skills you learned when completing the lip sync tutorial in June

We started our lessons by having a tutorial on how to edit a music video in Final Cut Pro. After which we were all put into groups and allocated a song, which we had to lip synch to for the first 3 paragraphs. We had to then film it 6 different times from start to finish allowing us more things to work with once we got to the editing suit. When it came to the editing, the tutorial Micky/Marisa did for us helped us start our editing. As the presentation took place they would stop and allow us to have a go at what they had just shown us helping us understand it fully by practising with them. One thing I noticed with editing of music videos was that the razor blade tool was used much more often than with film editing, similarly there were a lot more layers used one on top of the other with the music video and you had to be very careful to place them correctly with the black arrow pointing down rather than sideways as it split the whole thing. Perhaps the hardest part of learning to lip synch in FCP was finding the right beat to place a marker and editing the clips in such way that the movement of our lips fit in time with the song. When it came to us editing out own music video before we even began we had to find a beat to cut each clip to as our starting point with the marker. This was done to our base track firstly which was then the base to our whole video and all the other clips had to be built around it. Once that was done we had to go along the whole song and put a marker at every beat, this was done in order to help us cut different parts out at the right time as we could only cut things out on a beat which was marked by a marker. Over all the editing process was quite easy to understand because the presentation before we started was very helpful as they stopped and allowed us to have a go at it all together before it got to the real thing.

Overall me and my group were very pleased with our final edit mainly because it was our first try with this type of editing, but nevertheless it came out quite successful as it followed the rhythm of the song and we al sang in time with it too. • The Photoshop tutorial we had with Marisa helped us get an overall idea of how to use Photoshop. She showed us different effects and ways of editing our digipak, for instance when using the magic wand tool which helped crop out an image. Apart from the practical things, the presentation also taught us the basic conventions of digipaks such as what goes on the front, back and the side of the digipak. Overall the editing was pretty easy however because I wanted to use an image that had all three of us and we didn’t have that which meant I had to edit three separate images in such way that it looked like one, I personally found that the hardest bit due to the different shades of colour etc from the pictures themselves which made it really hard to make them look like one, so I had to look for the right effect to help me with this particular thing.

The image on the right is of my final front cover and as you can see the text plays a bit part in the over all look of it. That's I why when choosing the font, colour etc. it had to be simple and easy to read by anyone. The colours over all are mainly black and different shades of green which is done on purpose as the video itself is mainly located in the park so the colours on the digipak relate back to the track itself. • The images I chose were originally three separate ones, however I blended them in into one hoping to have connotations of closeness and friendship which is strongly portrayed in our music video. On the back of the digipak I chose to have lips as the main image because they have connotations of females and are also present in the chores of the video. • I used the crop tool as well as the shape tool to cut the images in particular shaped and then I had to re size them to fit into each other better and also look like one image instead of three. Over all I was happy with the finished worked however I feel it looks a bit simplistic so next time I will try and familiarise myself with Photoshop and all the different effects better before the editing comes