Reflection on lip synch tutorial experience, including photos and embedded video

Lip Synch Tutorial was our first filming task for this course. It was a great experience as I have undertaken the first step on learning the basic steps in making a music video.

We were given a CD by our media teacher, however, the song in the CD was not our group's or neither our teacher's choice. We worked on the song 'Ain't no stopping us now.'

What new skills did I learn through this activity?

What did I find most challenging?

Chronologically, in terms of editing, we had to upload the soundtrack first before the clips, cut it, and drag it on the timeline. When it comes to the soundtrack, one of our media teacher has advised us not to include the part of the song that has no words in it, instead start 

from the first word of the song. I learnt a new way on how to cut the soundtrack on Final Cut Pro (which differs from the way the soundtrack was edited when we were doing our thriller film) by only pressing 'M.' I also learnt how to overlay numbers of clips and aligning the red marks accurately so that the mouth movement of the subject in the video will match with the lyrics from the original soundtrack. Most essentially, I learnt how to match the time of where I have to cut the clip and the soundtrack.

What I did find most challenging was cutting the clip and the soundtrack both at the right time and blending the lyrics from the soundtrack with the mouth movement of our subject in our film. Finding the rhythm and marking the clips every 4 counts was also very challenging. 

This photo is a screen cap of our editing. My group had a small problem while we were editing our music video. The warning box in the middle of Final Cut Pro

has popped up and warned us about 'dropping playbacks.' After it has popped up a number of times, we asked for help from our media teacher, and she advised us to just tick off the box that says 'do not show this to me again' and just press okay as it would not affect our music video.

What New tools on Final Cut Pro did I learn to use?

Fairly, I did not learn any new tools. We only used the razer tool and I was already familiar with it as I often used it with my thriller film last year. However, in my opinion, I have improved on how to use it. This Lip synch tutorial has refreshed my memory on using tools in Final Cut Pro. 

 

Editing music videos differs compared to producing an opening to a thriller film. From my observation from editing our music video, there is a continuity, a repetition of clips. You'll only have one soundtrack which will be cut on final cut pro and a number of overlaying clips, whereas in producing a thriller film, you need to edit the clips, soundtrack, texts and effects all in different programmes. I find using the razer blade on music videos much easier and quicker than using it for a thriller film as it is all overlayed on top of each other. There is no need for adding 'slugs/gaps' in between each clip, unlike in a thriller film.

However as you can see above, a piece of paper which was the lyrics of the song was accidentally included in the video. We took a screen cap of this to show where we went wrong and to remind us that we need to be aware of our surrounding next time.