Mock-up Music Video - "Seven Nation Army" by The White Stripes (IGS Edition)

As a way to kick off the A2 course with a bang, it was decided that we would reproduce the music video to "Seven Nation Army" by The White Stripes.

We decided to use a school-based band of year 8 students who were set to perform the song as part of a show case night, as their coincidental performance was quite simply very convenient. However, this meant that we only had one night to film everything in!

Our teacher designated himself to provide the equipment needed and to act as the main organiser, so as students our first task was simply to show up on time. I arrived, as requested, 1 hour before the band was due to perform and began to help my teacher set up.
The plan was to record the band perform their song (live, so there was some audience noise picked up in our recording) and then to use the rest of the evening to film the band 'playing' (miming) the song; we wanted to recreate the song's original music video as closely as possible, so we had the students take on similar poses and expressions during filming. We filmed them in front of a green screen (which we took great care to light properly so that there were no shadows) as this meant we would be able to change the background on which the boys were seen, and create the same 'moving triangles' effect as seen in the original video.

Overall, the whole process of recording/filming went very smoothly - the band successfully performed their song so our audio recording was useable, and despite initial nerves they soon warmed up enough to give appropriate mime performances that we could use in our music video (although prompting and encouragement was needed at times, but that's all part of the job!)

Once filming was finished, we spent the following week's class time to edit the footage to create our version of the music video. After initial editing experimentation, it was decided that we should use FinalCut Pro for the green screening, as this programme made it a much simpler process than Premier Pro did. To use green screen all you had to do was select Keyer from effects and place it over the video footage; this turns the green screen in the clip black, and then ultimately translucent. After this I checked the matte to see that the lines were smooth, before going to colour selection and increasing the chroma roll off to 86%, which changes how many intermedial pixels are in-between the band member and the background.

After this I added the threshold in the basic filter. I brought the blue and green down in the lightest colours, and kept red, allowing me to create the same SIAN colour as the original video. 

 

In threshold I created a colour mask and selected the red colour in the footage so that colour would only be shown in that section (instead of SIAN on all the footage.)

 Also featured in the original music video were a few clips of marching skeletons and the image of an elephant - as a group, we searched YouTube for clips of animation on a green screen that we would be able to lift and use in our own video; we wound up using robots in our version.

Overall it was an interesting process, and while the song itself is now ruined for me forever (there's really only so many times you can listen to it), I enjoyed using the new technologies to bring our version to life.