Lip Sync Exercise

In class we did a lip sync using the song 'Price Tag' by Jessie J. This exercise taught us the technique that we would use next year when making our own music videos. We had a whole morning - 3 hours, to do this task. We shot three different shot types using an F3 camera - a different camera to what we used for our thrillers. Then we had to cut and edit the video to make a video which had the original track by Jessie J on it. We had to make sure that the people miming to the song were in time with the real version. One of the problems we found was that some of us (we used the people in our groups to be in the video so that all of us got a go on the camera) didn't actually sing the song out-loud as they just lip sun git, there was a real difference in how it looked. It looked a lot more accurate and realistic when the people actually sand the song out loud. This is an important factor to remember for next year when we are making our music videos.

For the three different shot types we did a tracking shot, a shot in-front of the green screen and a shot in-front of what looked like a living room (wallpaper and fireplace). It really made a difference to what the background was - and movement made the video a lot more interesting. The tracking shot was the most challenging for both the singer and the person pushing along the camera- as the singer and camera had to be going at exactly the same speed so that they were inline with each-other. Although it was the most challenging it was also the most impressive. Also by walking along it made me (as the singer) more comfortable as I had a beat to walk along to and it was less daunting than just standing there in-front of the camera. We also did 3 different shot types in-front of each background - mid shots, close ups etc.. There was studio etiquette - we had roles. Someone did the turn over, someone was the floor manager and someone did the playback.

When editing we dragged 10 clips that we thought we could use into the timeline. We first dragged the original song onto the timeline so that this was the base that we synced the videos to. In the song there were three beats at the beginning - this made sure that we could line up each of the shots to the base track accurately. We made sure that we cut to a beat so that it got cut neatly. This is also the convention used in most music videos. We used arrow keys on the computer to make sure that we got the beat bang on (so we had to listen out for that carefully). I found this exercise very useful as I am now confident that I would be able to makes sure a video had no out of time singing. I also feel it helped me be more confident in my ability to edit videos together which is a skill that I will need next year for our music video.