Wednesday, 20 May 2015

Technical Theatre 16

Today we were supposed to be finishing our music video, but we have experienced a few issues, which is very frustrating. Our goal today was to take the entire music video, duplicate it, and then when it plays the second time over to have it in reverse.
However - as I blogged about in our last session - there is no reverse or rewind effect on imovie.
So, this week Dominic helped us to export the video onto the server so he could reverse it on another device.

To export the file we had to:

  • Open the project in imovie
  • Select "share > export movie 
  • We exported the movie to the desktop, which took about 15 minutes
  • Then we dragged the exported file from desktop into the server 
While we waited for the movie to be exported to the desktop, Becca showed us Conchita Wurst's performance at the Eurovision 2015 semi finals to show us the lighting on it. It was really cool, they had a whole curtain of lights all controlled individually, moving up and down in a particular sequence that made it look like the movements of wings (which fits the song "Rise Like a Pheonix"). It was beautiful, I'd like to find out how they designed it. Becca told us that each light on there will have been controlled by DMX; I almost can't believe that such a huge display can be controlled by one system, but it's awesome. 

Anyway, after the movie finished exporting and we moved it into the server, Dominic then went to another device and reversed the movie for us on Final Cut Pro. He came back and helped us put the reversed file back onto the desktop and then we tried to move it into imovie, but this is where we reached our next problem. Even though imovie said the file upload was successful, we couldn't find the file anywhere in imovie. After trying to upload it a few more times but it still not working, we had no choice but to give up. 

It is really annoying that we still cannot finish it ourselves, but Dominic has really generously told us he'll export it as a different file type tomorrow morning to get it finished. Hopefully that will go well, and we will finally have our finished music video! 



Wednesday, 6 May 2015

Technical Theatre 15

Today in technical theatre we continued editing our video, but as Mo wasn't able to come in today, Elvina, Ryan and I worked on the video.
This week we were able to work a lot faster because we already know how to do the editing and stuff that we learnt last week.

We put in all the rest of the clips that we wanted to use using the same steps as last time, and it didn't take too long. But once we had used all of our available footage, we realised that we didn't have enough to cover the entire song! So frustrating, we really weren't sure what to do. We considered fading the song out, but at the point in the song where our footage finishes it sounds wrong fading out, so we eliminated that option.

We were desperately trying to think of a solution, when Ryan came up with a really cool idea. He said we could play the whole video in reverse at the end and then have it like it never happened. Elvina and I both loved this idea, and so we decided that was what we wanted to do.
But then, another obstacle arose.
Basically, we couldn't find anywhere the option to reverse clips or play them in rewind. We searched all over imovie and we couldn't find that effect anywhere. Annoyed but assuming we must have been missing something, we Googled it to find out how to do it. Our internet searches proved as fruitless as our searching around on imovie, though, we couldn't find any way to do it.
We suspected then that maybe you can't do it in version 9 of imovie, and Dominic came down and confirmed that for us. He said that in our next class he'll show us how to export our project onto another device and use different editing software to do the reverse effect, which is really nice of him.

So for now we've done all we can, and after we use the other software next class we get to start editing the completed video in terms of things like contrast and fades in and out.