Vox Populi - 30 Seconds To Mars Finished Video

This is our finished video.

FINISHED!!!

24/01/12!

Flashbacks

We have encourporated flashbacks of Cathy and Sam's relationship thoughout our video. This is to evoke audience emotion as they will see the relationship they had and the time that they spent together before Sam died. For these clips we needed a way to makie it obvious that these were flashbacks. To do this, we changed the clips into back and white and on the clips that contained the most movement, we added the effect of ghost trails. We have added these into parts of our video where we see fit.

Reversed video footage

As mentioned in the previous blog post we reversed some of our footage to fit with a section of speech in our song.The idea behind this was to show the target audience that Sam had died and that the rest of the music video was telling his story: what his life was like and how he died. This changed our music video quite a lot as we had other plans for clips that we wanted to use in this part of the song. However after listening to the song hundreds of times whilst editing we noticed the speech in this part of the song but it was mumbled and we all thought it sounded sort of 'backwards' which gave us the idea to reverse the clips. We also added an aged effect to the clips as we felt it helped to distinguish between this part of the music video and the rest of it.

Sam's death

Seen as we didn't film any actual footage of Sam being shot, we came up with an alternative solution. We already put together the footage before Sam is shot, and then right after. We decided to use a black screen with machine gun sounds layered over the top to create intensity.

Where we're at

The hand in date for the coursework coming in fast and we're working extra hours to get the video finished. I'm confident that we'll have it done in time as we've edited most of it together already.
Whilst editing I've found that our idea has stayed the same but our shots and orders have changed dramatically. We've also taken extra inspiration from existing music videos and used similar techniques to them (such as opening with a quote).

Ending Quote

At the end of our video we wanted to put a quote which goes like this:

And when he gets to heaven

To St.Peter he will tell:

"One more soldier reporting sir,

I've served my time in hell."

We think that this is a really powerful quote to use as it highlights the same truths which we are trying to show about war; War is Hell.

Opening Titles

After searching around on YouTube I found a video with opening titles at the start where the writing distorted slightly, moving to the side before becoming clear again.
We plan to do something like this on our own video if we can find a similar effect.

Boot Shots

We wanted shots of the soldiers feet for the same counts. I also filmed this from different angles. I also filmed brief images of Chris's hands depicting the triad as Cathy suggested.

Rifle Drill

We wanted to encorporate a rifle drill for certain counts in the song. I filmed our soldier Chris, repeatedly doing this from different angles. 

Titles

We've used quotes/titles to open our video with. As well as the quote, we've written 'Remember, head up, chin down. love Sam x' We've taken this from the end of the letter home from the soldier in a previous post I put up.

We've decided to do this to show a final message from Sam (since he dies in the video). I hope that people watching the video will understand this reference as it intensifies the message of the video.

Video Titles

30 Seconds to mars almost always start off their music videos with a quote that has something to do with the topic that the song is based on. E.g 'Beautiful Lie' has quotes and bits of information about the effect that climate change has on the ice glaciers and quotes in 'This Is War'

New Year!

It's getting closer and closer to the hand in date for our video. We've done a lot of our editing already so we're going to focusing on finishing it off. We're going to be working on our video during lunch/break times and whenever he mac suite is available. We're confident that we will complete our video on time! :)

Fire safety

Before we started filming the fire scenes of our music video we made sure to take several safety precautions, including: having a fire extinguisher on hand and a bucket of water. We also made sure that nobody got too close to the fire and informed the neighbours that we were going to have a fire in the garden.

Digipack Final Inside