Filming, Editing, and all that jazz

                  (Pic of re-imagined Dave Grohl here)

When it came to 'filming' our music video we had decided on a feel that we wanted the characters to have for example we wanted to keep a link to the Foo Fighters other than just using the music track, so we decided that the vocalist should be based on Dave Grohl but more cartoon like and not as serious as he is portrayed in the official The Pretender music video.

We also used references from other anime and manga characters that we both liked and re-designed them slightly but still kept distinct references to the orringinal character for example the female guitarist who was based off of Maka Albarn from Soul Eater, the main reference we kept here was her signature long coat outfit, but changed the hair style.

During the main filming/creation process we both learned to use Adobe Flash to animate our designated characters my characters being the female guitarist based on Maka Albarn and the drummer who was added at a later date. Animating the characters was reletively straght forward as we had used different layers to draw our characters out and then as we imported them into Adobe Flash each layer was seperate and allowed us to animate each character with a minimal errors, ok there were a few small errors such as one character having only one arm etc but in general it went pretty well.

Editing

During the editing phase we followed these steps:

1. Import the animated characters into Adobe Premeire Pro.
2. Cut the clips to size and put them in a basic order along side the audio track.
3. Make use of various cut-away we had made (Speakers, Audience(es?) etc)
4. Reflect back on previous ideas, begin to structure the clips.
5. Look into various transitions
6. Begin Post Production
7. Look into using Ultra Key on each clip.
8. Clean up the video
9. Clean up the video some more...
10. Make small alterations if needed and finish.

After step 5 we went into post production but instead of using the luma key tool to add our backgrounds in we used the Ultra Key which was a much more strait-forward and easier tool to use. In order to do this however, we had repeat a process of drag and drop the ultra key onto all of the desired clips, this must have taken at least 4 hours to accomplish and was very, very (emphasis on the very) unenjoyable but we knew that it was nessecary to do this so we could use our background images and finish the piece as a whole.