NINETEEN – THE LAST MIDNIGHT

FINAL MV REFLECTION

Abby loved it! and not only that she shared it on Facebook and with all her family and friends and to be honest it’s the most satisfying thing to hear that your work can be appreciated. So what now? Well I need to vent out and reflect on the end product. So here is a list of things I have to comment about the video.

1. We didn’t get to convey our princesses to the best of our advantage. Rohan had warned us earlier that the concept may not be interpreted well enough, and sure enough people had no clue what I was talking about when I said the characters were princesses. It’s a shame but it’s not too bad. Most people so far think it was quirky and cute, the only downside to this though is the constant questions about Rapunzel’s wig. In all the beautiful natural scenery and then to have her wig pull you out of the fantasy was the biggest critique I’ve had so far. But we did still keep the romantic fairytale feel to the entire video, especially the ending.

2. Cutting out scenes was hard for me. Initially the plot was already very thin, with Rohan again giving us encouragement to make things more grand or to just find ways to fill the space, but what we found was that we ending up with too much space in the beginning and had to cut some scenes. Most specifically all the scenes with Cinderella and Elvis hair dude. The reason why we had to was because of time, but also due to the poor way we shot the scenes. It was unfair of us to use the shots to both Abby and Alaine who had both their own representation being distributed by us. We wanted to put out a flattering video and the majority of her scene just didn’t convey the right tone or fit stylistically with the rest of the video. I know I commented on this in a previous blog, but it is a shame that we couldn’t get more of her in the video. As a friend I feel like I did Alaine a dis-service for making her come all the way out the the Royal Botanic Gardens to only be let down and have 3 shots dictate her whole entire story. We did find out that by the time we came around to her character the fact that we shortened her scene helped the flow of the story, but it still hurts to cut out anything in a project. Thank god Maggie was there to be the bigger person and know what we needed and didn’t need. If I had my own way I would have made a 13 minutes extended directors cut with more scenes, and proper dialogue.

3. The last thing I want to comment on was the colour grade we ended up with. In the beginning stages we wanted to have a vintage feel to the video, with Jordan making mock concept photos of what the aesthetic style for the video would be. We later found that it was too much to make it more rich in purple and would actually hurt our footage to go so radical with the colour grade. Then Jordan had begun his process of making things more yellow and supposedly warm, but I then went in and went the complete opposite by making it more green. Neither of us were wrong in doing so, since it all was down to aesthetic preferences, but in my final product I ended up over-exposing one of the shots and completely overlooked it in the editing process. So what I had thought was the final final video, turned out to be faulty and with very little time left to fix it, we had to fallback onto the raw version of the video to submit. It was unfortunate and I personally and disappointed that I didn’t pick up on it sooner. But fear not, we have expressed to Abby that of she wants it we can create a different version for her to upload to YouTube.

So with that being said, as you can see I haven’t got a YouTube version for me to send out and link here. Once Abby has uploaded what she is happy with I will definitely come back and share that with everyone who joined me along this journey. So with this the final blog post should be up soon, and it’s definitely going to be in celebration of the end. Goodnight guys.