Final Project
Recording Diary
This is where I will be tracking all my work with an evaluative diary showing what I did on every week including what I researched, any progress made and any changes made.
Week 1
Throughout week 1 I developed a clear understanding of what I was going to do for my final project and how I was going to do it.
With the help of a bandmate we had come up with the idea that we're going to record a music video as professional as possible and have a fully mixed and mastered song to go with it.
About the video:
The music video will be shot in the college theatre with an appropriate backdrop and the song we are going to do is "Ready to Let Go" by Cage The Elephants. We decided to do this song because we just like it and the video will be recorded on our phones and the guitars and track will be recorded into logic pro x.
Problems I think we will face will be mainly associated with the college theatre as this room is very competitive to get around these months because it gets used as a classroom as well as other courses using it for their final projects. If we don't manage to record in the theatre, the college studios will be okay.
Week 2
This week I am mostly going to spend researching various things about how to make a professional music video.
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I am researching specifically; Video, Music and Mixing
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For research on the video I am going to research various things like how lighting can affect the video and backdrops/ props.
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This video goes over some helpful tips for video-graphing on phones
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3 things I am going to take from this video is Camera Angles, Colour grading and Background accessories.
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Camera angles will be important for our video and the current plan is to set up 2 camera angles one on the left and one on the right to cover most angles.
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Post video production will be done such as contrast, saturation and balance to ensure our video looks as professional as possible.
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The background of our set will be the a full gig layout with drums and amps out on the stage which we will set up before the video.
This video gave a more inside account of how to record a music video. Although this video focuses on movement and my video has static camera angles there is a lot of useful information about general videography that will be impactful in a positive way if applied to my music video
Because we are recording on phone cameras, I am mostly taking away information about variables that I can change without swapping cameras so things like lighting, video stabilizers and also things like general confidence when recording.
Week 3
This week I gave a presentation on my current progress on milestone 1 to my peers and got a peer reviews to analyse and go over.
This is my presentation
These are the peer reviews I got and after reading through them it's good to see that my peers think my plan is clear and well presented as well as getting feedback for future presentations such as talking louder.
Week 4
Week 4 consisted of reading though my peer reviews and taking feedback from my peers as well as finishing any written work I have to do at the time and hand everything in on classroom to make sure I am on time for deadlines.
This week I noticed I also didn't really know how to mix guitars 100% confidently so I watched a few YouTube videos and took a few notes on my phone about mixing guitars for future reference
There are a few things in this video I already know such as editing transients however I noticed as he started talking about mixing mid ranges more I found more gaps in my knowledge so I took more notes.
I watched this video specifically for the information he gives about compression and reverb. I found this information useful because compression mixing is something I struggle with so I wrote down the key points he mentioned and demostrated.
Week 5
This week I spent researching mostly, and because cap cut was the main app we're using to edit the videos I decided to research a little more on it to make better videos.
I watched this video a few times whilst trying to use cap cut and towards the end I began to feel a bit more natural whilst using it.
This video was very helpful, specifically the 'matching a beat' section and this is because we are going to be doing that a lot every time we switch a camera angle in the videos and we plan on having more than 1 camera angle.
Week 6
This week is going to be the last week where I prioritise written work such as research and classroom before I start to move onto the more practical side of my project such as rehearsing and shooting the video. This is an exciting time in the project as we move from planning to practical.
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Because of this I used this week to review my whole project plan once again to make sure it was all still possible and that all the logistics, people involved could still partake. We also went over the setup and equipment we are going to use and changed what needed to be changed which luckily wasn't much besides backdrops.
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However, in doing this I discovered that shooting in the theatre would be very difficult due to other courses also requiring it for shows and other rehearsals. I will still try and make it possible to use the theatre however this has highlighted a potential problem which I will solve by just recording the video in the studio instead.
Week 7
This was the first week of the practical side of the project, this week was spent rehearsing songs.
This is us rehearsing a song called "Tyrants" by Catfish and The Bottlemen
This video was our very first attempt at recording a video and it took us an hour to do from getting all the equipment such as the lights and guitar amps and recording the video takes.
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For the drum track we just used a track that was on Youtube for the song and we practiced to that since we don't have a drummer.
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We recorded this video by using 3 separate phones; One for the high up camera angle, one for the close up camera angle and then we used the phone with the best mic for audio with both guitars and the drum track in 1 audio file.
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We used two photoshoot lights; One was a warm filament light which is the one seen in the video which we placed towards the far left of the angle and we used a second white light pointing towards us which we placed behind the cameras.
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I think the recording went well and I am happy at how the video looks. Something I think we can improve on is the audio quality. Since it was recorded on a phone I'm surprised at how clean everything sounds. For future weeks to get an even more cleaner sound we are going to look into actually recording the guitar amps with Sure SM57s to get a much cleaner recording.
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Overall I'm very happy with this video as it is our first attempt at recording videos and we did it in quick succession as well as not really knowing much before we recorded it so a majority of the time we spent just experimenting with different things such as camera angles and which lights we preferred as well as how we wanted the set to look. This is a good progress marker for us and we are going to be making more rehearsal videos in preparation for the real thing.
Week 8
This week we continued rehearsing songs in preparation for the final recording. We rehearsed a wide range of songs from over 4 different genres in preparation for the video.
This week we rehearsed "The Kill" by 30 Seconds To Mars.
We recorded this video the exact same way we did the previous week. To keep each video different we decided to change up the background of the video by recording it facing a different way in the studio.
This week was much quicker than the last as we managed to record the song in about 30 minutes.
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This week we experimented more with getting a clean tone on the guitars and seeing how they react with the audio which generally I think was well received. In future weeks we are going to continue to use both clean and distorted tones since they both work well for their respective songs.​​
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We kept the same warm filament light, this time placing it behind the cameras, and decided to not use the white light this week simply for we didn't have enough space behind the cameras to place another light and we kept the light of the control room on to give a bit more atmosphere.
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This week I think we did well on the atmosphere of the shot as well as the simpleness of it. I think we could work on making the shot look more professional as well as.
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Overall I am happy with the results from this week and I think we are making good progress.
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Week 9
We spent a majority of this week writing original songs which we decided to record into Logic Pro X using a scarlet box at the end.
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This week we focussed more on the audio quality side of the project instead of the video side which we had been doing in the previous weeks.
This is a photo of me recording Lead Guitar for the track.
This is the logic file for what we did.
This week we decided to change up the videos and just recorded our writing process in the control room of the studios instead of the practicing.
I think the videos turned out good and progress is still being made.
Week 10
This was the week the final video was shot.
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We tried to get the theatre for the video but unfortunately the drama were hosting their final shows all week and so it was unavailable so we did the next best thing which was to make the studio as cool as we could with equipment we found from around the college.
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There's a funny story about this final video which is whilst we were realising the theatre wouldn't be available in time for our final project we stumbled across an open cupboard which was full of props which we then raided and got the two trees which we thought would look good for the video.​ We then essentially built the entire set around the two trees because we decided they were staying for the video.
We then added the necessary things for the video such as the amps, mics and piano and used the same filament light we used in the previous weeks because we knew it worked and looked good so we kept it. We felt the set was still missing something so we kept the control room light on to which then resolved our issue whilst retaining good lighting for the video. We then used the 3 phone cameras for all the angles.
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Despite this being our final video we felt comfortable with mixing the acoustic and electric guitar tones with each other so we did it.​
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Overall I am happy with the video, I am slightly disappointed with not getting the theatre but I think we tackled the issue well and managed to get a good video nonetheless and we made a suitable set for the song we done.
This video we recorded differently to the other previous videos and what makes this video different is that we used a room mic as the main recording mic which we put into logic Pro X.
The mic that was used for the guitar amp and acoustic guitar was fed into software which came out of the big speakers that are seen in the background which was then picked up by the room mic.
This is the final video
Week 11
This is the final week of the project and I spent it refining my Wix and looking back over the videos and seeing what I would change and what I would keep the same.
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I am happy with a lot of the things in the project but the one thing that stands out for me is the quality of the videos, both cinematically and sound wise, because all videos except from the final video were recorded using phone cameras and phone mics. At first this was something we hesitated to do because phones typically don't have a great reputation with practical work however we decided to try it once and we thought it was god enough to continue doing.
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Something I would change about what we did would be how we handled the sound quality. I think the quality of the videos are good however next time I think we could focus on making it that one more level of professional by getting the videos mixed and mastered in post production and having them recorded in a professional manner.
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Overall I am very happy with my project and I am pleased with how it all turned out despite the challenges faced and how we tackled them.