Evaluation Q1 : Did you enjoy the main workshop shoot day? What role(s) did you take? What were your best bits and why?

Different Set-ups I was involved in

For me, our music video remake workshop day was by far the most fun I have ever had doing media studies and also gave me an immensely valuable learning experience, working with professionals, such as our Director Dom and Camera OP Ed. The entire process gave me performance skills I never knew I had, let me learn and work alongside professionals and have fun with my friends at the same time.

How the studio changed throughout the day

Throughout the shoot day, I took on many roles, such as the lead finger tutter, backing dancer for the hip-hop, cheerleading and end dance scene and the pianist in the band scenes. I also marked the ballet scenes with the clapper board.

For me there were 3 main parts of the workshop that I really enjoyed, they were:

• Performing my finger tutting
• Learning about the lighting desk from Eddie
• Being the pianist in the backing band

However, my favourite part was performing my finger tutting, because I had put lots of time into learning and perfecting the routine for the previous 9 days, so seeing it all come together so well was really satisfying.

Finger Tutting

My Finger Tutting Routine

Evaluation Q2 : What have you learnt from participating in each of the prelim tasks 1, 2, 3 and 5?

When completing the preliminary exercise, we had to complete many other tasks, other than just the main workshop day. These include:

• Task 1 - Completing an audition video (as seen below)
• Task 2 - Learning and practising our performance with Tash and Jasmine
• Task 3 - Helping to plan and organise our costumes with Olivia and Mrs. Dymioti
• Task 5 - Editing our remake video

The video below is Jerom, Gabriel and my audition video, to the Bruno Mars song "Uptown Funk"

Below I have included a haiku deck which goes through each individual task and highlights key skills and ideas that I learnt and improved upon, whilst completing each task of the prelim. For me, I most enjoyed Task 4, which was not required for this blog post, but I also enjoyed Task 5 a lot, as I am a keen editor and enjoy learning new techniques.

An example costume shot of Gabriel with his Hip-Hop costume

Our Dance Coach "Tash" Performing my Routine

Olivia (Head of Costumes) adjusting my tutting outfit

Over 200 Shots across 7 Tracks, Our Editing Timeline

Evaluation Q3 : Are you pleased with the footage and your finished edit? Is it how you expected it to look? What works really well and what would you change?

I am very pleased with my final edit of our remake video for Taylor Swift's Shake It Off, which I completed with Alex Nicolaides. All of the footage captured looked really professional and sharp, which made it exceptionally easy to grade and edit with. 

Our Editing Workflow

Occasionally we could not achieve perfect shot-for-shot likeness with the original, due to complex dance moves or cinematographic techniques for example, however in these cases appropriate and good looking footage was captured instead, through guidance by our director, Dom and main camera op, Ed. Below I have Alex N and my completed edit.



Alex N and myself edited the video over the course of 2 weeks, both inside and outside of lesson time, using dual monitored edit suites and Premiere Pro CS5.5. The actual cutting and positioning of the shots took the longest period of time and due to the high quality nature of our rushes, grading only took a couple of days. I think our grading for some set-ups definitely looked different to how I originally imagined it would, such as the band set-up I did not expect to look so dark, however other set-ups such as the end dance scene definitely look as bright as I had first envisioned. Overall, I am still extremely happy with all the shots, however if I was to complete the remake again, I would have tried filming a few different shot types as slow-mos, as we often had close-ups, but not necessarily the wides or mids that the original used.

Annotated Diagram of Premiere Pro CS5.5

I really like how well some asepcts of the video came out in particular, for example:

• The tutting set-up
• The ballet shot's grading
• The slow mo ribbon dancing

I liked these most of all, as I felt they fully met, if not exceeded my expectations for how professional they look. For example, I think the grading of the ballet shots very closely mimics the cold, yet glossy hollywood look of the original ballet shots.

Before and After Grading

The ribbon dancing slow-mo

Evaluation Q4 : How do you think your prelim experiences will impact to your approach to next term's music video coursework?

I think one of the biggest takeaways from our preliminary exercise is the massive improvement to be found in our performance skills. Our ability to lip sync and perform in front of a camera is a massive asset to us now and could definitely be utilised in our actual music video. I also think I would pay far more attention to the costume, hair and make-up of our characters as good hair and make-up really improves the professionalism of our music video. I also think that all of the organisational work done by our 1st AD, Amy, cannot be overlooked and will definitely be imitated when we produce our own video.



Overall, I found our music video remake workshop extremely good fun and I learnt lots about making a music video that I could apply to our own video in September. I think the project has also inspired me to be adventurous with my own video in September and use a mixture of figurative and performance based footage, perhaps tackling the grime or EDM genres of music, whilst trying to utilise the immense possibilities available to us in the Seward Studio, through its lighting decks and cyclorama.

Our Media Class at the end of the Workshop