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?

                           Echosmith - Cool Kids Remake - Emilio, Sayo from Latymermedia on Vimeo.

Our finished music video remake edit. For optimal viewing select the best HD quality you can support and use fullscreen.

I am quite pleased with the footage and our finished edit.

The footage, overall, is great. The crew did multiple takes, and they are all quite long, and this means most of the time the exact action that appears in the real video is present in our footage. However, some of the footage isn't framed correctly, and so had to be reframed using Premiere, and some of the footage doesn't have the correct lighting. While overall the lighting was great, and really made everyone look good, in the real video the background for different shots was different colours at different times, and the lighting often dims or brightens over the course of one shot. This was harder to do in Premiere, and would have been better to do while shooting. In the end though, the footage is definitely better looking than I expected- since so many of the movements are meant to be natural, I was surprised at how many of them we were able to copy, and this makes up for any small problems.

A ten-second .gif showing the fairly high accuracy of the footage we chose for our final edit- as you can see, the character and shot movements, as well as the framing and other editing, are quite similar to the real video seen in the bottom right-hand corner.

The edit looks quite good too. The lip-syncing and shot times are matched up pretty much perfectly, and the grading looks pretty good too, even if it isn't wholly accurate sometimes. Inventive grading did end up fixing a couple of the problems with the footage, such as pink and yellow tints, as well as grey backgrounds. Premiere's movement tools really helped with shot positioning, and a lot of the shots are practically identical to the real video because of this. It ended up looking very close to the real video, which is better than I expected, as I thought we would need more compromise.

Another ten-second .gif, this time showing how the editing and grading contributed to the accuracy of the video. Shots are tinted, for example, yellow and grey where needed, and various flashes have been inserted to match the ones in the real video.

I would say that the recolouration of certain shots is actually both what works well and what I would change. This is because when it works well, it works really well, but when it doesn't work, it looks somewhat strange. Given another chance and more time I would spend a lot more time tweaking the grading and so on to achieve the correct and desired effects, and I would also cut my losses a bit more than I actually did- we decided not to recolour some shots as with the recolouring they looked strange, and this compromise raised the quality of the video as a whole despite losing some similarity, but I think a few shots we did recolour should maybe also have been left plain.

The first shot of the finished video, and an example of good recolouration- original with grading on the left, and the recoloured version on the right. The grey fade we added to the bottom of the shot makes it look a lot more similar to the real shot, and doesn't negatively impact overall grading or visuals in any other way.

A shot from around one minute twenty seconds of the finished video, and an example of unsuccessful recolouration- original with grading on the left, and the recoloured version on the right. This time, while the grey fade makes the background look more similar, it makes the grading not look as good, and there is a noticeable change in colour across the singer's legs and the drum kit. We probably would have had better results by scrapping the recolour and focusing on fine-tuning the grading some more.