Video - Summer Nites

Below is the final Summer Nites video, it contains a mix of performance shots along with some shots arranged in a summer montage. It is fairly close to the storyboard I planned however the beginning and end I changed at Jack's request - he is a film student and so he helped come up with the idea at the beginning with the fade to white transition. I personally like the idea but was unable to make it work well enough because the clouds were rather grey during the shot I used.
In general, I quite like the concept and feel that I've really captured the fleeting essence of summer and its fun, the montage adequately shows the variety in activities during our teenage days. It's all rather positive in its imagery which adheres to the happy upbeat sound of the acoustic guitar.

It was difficult to film the candid shots as my friends were rather aware that I was shooting on the day, given that I notified them before hand. I have mixed feelings about the handheld camera, on the one hand I believe it fits the video nicely however on the other hand I think that it is too shaky in some parts which might not work in other types of videos with different concepts - which may need to be more still or clear in order to appear professional. I considered changing the colour of the montage clips or slowing them down, like in the Strypes' Hard to Say No, to differentiate between the performance clips better - further showing that the handheld filming was intentional.

Notably, light is very important in creating a good video, I especially learned this last year during one of my AS project videos (see my evaluation of the video). It seems that the lighting during Jack's performance isn't very clear but it does look fine outside - leading me to realise again that natural lighting, though temperamental, is the best for videos; perhaps artificial lighting would work if the bulbs produced very white light, as opposed to orangey light. The lighting is especially good at 0:44 in the video so perhaps shooting outside or with another camera could help make my videos look more visually appealing.
I edited the shots with hard cuts and little transitions, thus this video is quite different form my preliminary. I felt that the transitions wouldn't be necessary given that I wanted to create a montage, additionally since I was working from footage sent by friends it'd be difficult to include zoom or whip-pan transitions as I had no control over how the clips were shot.

I'm quite fond of how the font looks, it's quite reminiscent of the sans-serif font of the Strypes and the Vaccines. The Strypes use their font at the beginning of a lot of their music videos:

This choice to include the band name in the video, despite it being titled online, helps reinforce further the brand identity - something I should look into. It's quite memorable, which I suppose is why the Strypes used it given that they are a newly 'major' band. As I wish to focus in on Jack's identity as an artist, I believed it important to include his name on the video as he is a rather unknown artist. With this in mind, I understand how Jack can fit into the indie genre and will need to further look into the conventions of the indie genre. With this in mind, I am aware that most psychedelic bands include very serif fonts and will perhaps include such text on the album cover; it's important that the audience is able to read the text but should the text fit well as serif in the video then I might deviate from my choice here.
The Strypes are quite a large influence for me in my work, my preliminary video even had some whip-pan transitions which can be seen in a few of their videos. While Jack also shares my love for their music (and he likely admires them given that they are of similar age to use yet very successful), I do not believe they are a direct inspiration to his work. It may help for me to look into bands that Jack particularly associates with his music, thus I will ask for a list in the near future.



Summer Nites from Eughan Wooding on Vimeo.

In the end, it doesn't necessarily matter how I feel about the video as long as my client (Jack) is happy. I asked for feedback and while his response was brief, it is a clearly positive comment. Perhaps in the future I will ask for a more detailed response, maybe even choosing to question some friends as they are teenagers - likely to be the target audience, however I will need to look into the demographic at a later date.