The Finished Article

The Real Deal

At the beginning of the project we decided that we would not watch the official video for this song, just in case we made one that was similar. Needless to say, when we watched this we were absolutely shocked at the similarities, especially the beginning and end, the blue 'shiny box' effect, the character exploding, the alarm clock... It's eerie how much our music video resembles and parodies the real thing without us once watching it for reference.




Weird.

Class Feedback

We were pleased that most feedback from our peers was good. To summarise:

• Good editing pace.
• Good use of special effects.
• Plenty of interesting shots/locations.
• Near-perfect lipsyncing.
• DON'T DROP THE N BOMB LOL.
• Split-screen is effective.
• Awesome jacket.
• Narrative slightly confusing?
• Excellent performers.
• Definitely improved since rough cut.
• Lipsyncing is amazing.
  

Techniques of Note

Cool things we did that should be pointed out:

Colour filter dissolves out.

Interesting events in background.

Double-team achieved with a mixture of layer masks, cross-dissolves and colour-correction.

Slow-motion zombie voyeurism.

Stock explosion layer from Detonation Films.

The Plans Have Changed

It was a strange realisation when we neared our final cut and saw that what we had made was so very different from what we had planned. We did end up 'conforming to (some) rap video conventions', we did 'create visual puns' but not enough, and we did include the narrative we had planned from the start. What we did not do was keep the focus on our literal lyric jokes, instead shifting very much towards the narrative and zombie shots (which became so much more than the 4 seconds they were going to be. You know what else we didn't do? The ducks.
No ducks at all in our video, although we know what sound we'll use if we need to censor the swear words...

In the end we had three performance settings, a narrative and other small cutaways. A strength of our video, we feel, was the sheer amount of footage we had that made it very easy not to repeat ourselves. Things we made sure to do were make the performance sequences tie in to the others. For example, the zombies clash with the shiny box, and the nerd in the narrative runs through both other performance settings. In a way it's interesting to see how the video has progressed, and what things worked and didn't under the limitations we were given.

We managed to use conventions better that we had thought at first, fitting in slow motion, split-screen, focus on performer, voyeuristic representation of the female body (zombies), but still no cars. Our final video is a product of taking some of our good ideas and letting them evolve over days and weeks of filming with intelligent, like-minded people.

Lyrical representation we did achieve:

• as live as it gets / dead wrong
• dogs
• these bitches...
• quit talking
• listen to my shit
• you don't chew...
• blow up your box