Sunday, 12 July 2009

Pre-Lim Task : 'Midnight At The Oasis'

Before my group started the actual task we decided to do a pre-lim task, we were given a song called 'Midnight At The Oasis' that we had to make made a music video for.
When I had read the lyrics and discussed the with my group we came up with a story board and treatment. We started filming shortly after we had finished the treatment, it took us two hours to get 6 minutes if film, which we then edited down to just over a minute on final cut.

This was a really good task and I feel that my group learnt a lot of new skills, for example, we learnt about filming and how much planning is needed to get the right shots. We also learnt how to edit our film, which will come in handy when we come to filming and then editing our music video.

Planning > My group decided the first thing we would need to do is to look at the lyrics of the song and decide form there where we go next.

The lyrics are as follows >

Midnight at the oasis
Send your camel to bed

Shadows paintin' our faces
Traces of romance in our heads

Heaven's holdin' a half-moon
Shinin' just for us
Let's slip off to a sand dune, real soon
And kick up a little dust

Come on, Cactus is our friend
He'll point out the way
Come on, 'til the evenin' ends
'Til the evenin' ends

You don't have to answer
There's no need to speak
I'll be your belly dancer, prancer
And you can be my sheik

[Instrumental Interlude]

I know your Daddy's a sultan
A nomad known to all
With fifty girls to attend him, they all send him
Jump at his beck and call

But you won't need no harem, honey
When I'm by your side
And you won't need no camel, no no
When I take you for a ride

Come on, Cactus is our friend
He'll point out the way
Come on, 'til the evenin' ends
'Til the evenin' ends

Midnight at the oasis
Send your camel to bed
Got shadows paintin' our faces
And traces of romance in our heads

Oh, come on...


After we read the lyrics my group decided on a story board and shots we were going to use. We thought it would be a good idea to have the lead singer running into a hotel called 'Oasis'. The lady running into the hotel is the singer, she is late for her performance at the hotel. When she gets through the main lobby, she is hurried up the stairs to her dressing room where she gets ready to perform at the hotel. The video follows her from when she arrives to the hotel, during her performance till she finishes her performance.
The video just covers the first couple of scenes as we only had a few hours to film and edit the footage. After editing the clips we backed the film against the song.

We decided after making the actual music video for 'Midnight At The Oasis' that it would be a good idea to try and lip sync, as this would be a good skill to have when making our video for The Sun Is Shining. My group filed me singing along to Midnight At The Oasis, after this we put the film onto Final Cut and matched up the singing with the vocals from the song, this takes patience and precision to get the timing right.

Doing this pre-lim task has helped my group immensely, we have learnt about filming and editing as well as lip syncing, which is a very useful skill as we will to do this when editing The Sun Is Shining Video. We have made some errors while filming, examples of this is when filming we left certain bits of props in the wrong scenes, so when filming a different scene the prop was still there in the back ground. We have learnt from those kind of mistakes and are confident that when we film The Sun Is Shining we won't make any of these mistakes.





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