This live show project has been in the works for a while, and we've all put in a lot of effort as a team to provide the best final product. 

Assigning roles to everyone was the first thing we did when we started this project in order to give ourselves specific tasks to do. 

I was given the responsibility of being the "communication manager," which ultimately turned into me to taking on more of a planning and leadership role. I had to make sure that everyone was aware of what was expected of them at all times, as well as to schedule our tasks for each week and make sure they were both online and offline so that those of us who weren't in college could complete them. I made a google document with everyone's roles, a breakdown of work per week and who was responsible, a list of team members' side notes, and anything else we thought was relevant. I had copied this document  on the whiteboard in our classroom so that those in college could see what tasks each week entailed. 

At first our idea for the live show was to have Millenials react to 'Gen Z Culture', as generation z has been proven to be the most, sensitive, dramatic and 'problematic' generation - however we changed this idea later, after feeling like the concept was more picking fun at Gen Z, which was not our aim. We adjusted the live show accordingly, rather than reacting to Gen Z culture, we opted to have millennials react to generation z music. 

This is when we had the research team go and find suitable music videos, that we deemed 'controversial', they done this by creating a survey, asking other students what their music interests were, what their preferred artists and genre was, and to link what they think is in their eyes, the most controversial music video they have seen as of recent.

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Week 1:

Myself, Izzy and Maria were set designers, being tasked with creating and printing a backdrop for our set, aswell as making our set look comfortable.

I had brought In my iPad and Apple Pencil to draw a backdrop using a photoshop like program, called Procreate. We watched various FineBros/REACT videos, to get inspiration on how they design their sets, we oped to create something bright and simple, I had a few issues however, with the technological limitations of my laptop, iPad and college computers, as the desired size, (218x180cm) was too large of a canvas, making the aforementioned devices lag, or crash outright, we experimented with designing a 1/6th size of our backdrop then sticking them together however it came out tacky. We solved this by individually creating the assets (arrows, squares, circles)  on a transparent backgrounds then putting them on the photoshop canvas.

Maria came with the design, featuring a Blue, Purple and Green colour palette, featuring a lot of simple geometry.

Our major issue arises when It came to printing, as Reprographics had limits on the size of their printers, and we needed a 218CM X 180CM page, however the printers were limited at 110xinf, we opted to cut our design in half, printing two separate pages then having them stuck together, which worked perfectly, we mounted the backdrop to a wooden frame, made wider using 2 pieces of baton wood, thanks to the colleges, Woodwork technician. 

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Week 2:

Week 2 started off with myself and the rest of our class meeting in Taunton Town, to buy props for the show, however only ended up with 2 fake plants and a white tablecloth. Next time I would have planned in more detail what it is I would need to buy beforehand to get a clear image of what the set will look like, rather than leaving it up to luck and finding something we may like.

Most of week 2 was spent updating our website, researching how REACT creates and formats their videos, and planning ways to adjust that in our image, we primarily looked at the codes and conventions of a REACT video so that we could apply them to our work. Friday a the end of week 2. We held a test shoot, setting up the studio, cameras, and lighting as live, to allow us to find if we had any major issues, that we didn't think of however everything ran very smooth, other than issues with the cinema cameras feeds not appearing in the gallery. This was due to their resolution, not all being the same across the board, this was quickly fixed and we went on record for a test shoot, this is when we realized that our concept for the live show was flawed, and would have to change, we realized when Ed had asked us what exactly our concept was, we all stumbled for an answer and realized that our idea was more mocking Generation Z than anything, we opted to change to Millennials react to Generation Z music.

Next time I will make sure that my idea of a live show, is easier to explain, allowing us to understand any flaws in the idea, this will ensure that I don't accidentally make a video, mocking someone/something - If our idea is hard to explain that means we don't have a true understanding of it, making it harder to get our idea across in a video format

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Week 3:

I spent week 3 correcting information on my website because of our new ideas. This week was also the week we was supposed to film our actual live performance, however, due to the availability of our guests we had to cancel and reschedule for the following Friday, we took this time to look for new guests, as some of ours were not available on the dates we required, we managed to get the help of two staff members, Becky and Elle, bringing us back to a total of 4 guests, including two others the researchers had previously contacted.

Next time when contacting a guest for a project like this, I will arrange a backup date, just in case, something goes wrong so that if the guest can't do the original date, we will have another to fall back on, just in case.

 

Week 4:

This was an intense week for us as we had our deadline the following Tuesday, so if anything went wrong this week, we would have to deal with it and move on. On the day of our newly scheduled live performance (Friday 9th), we spent the first two and a half hours setting up the studio with the help of the media technician, Kris. We had major issues with the cameras, whenever we would change the shutter speed, or aperture,  they would reset back to their original value, we later after the filming had concluded found out this was due to the computer in the gallery having priority over the controls.

The whole show was filmed quite effortlessly, with no major issues, besides the cameras being too dark because of the camera exposures being locked, we mended this by increasing the brightness of our lights and adding a softbox.

I was the one responsible for the editing, so once the filming had concluded, I had to extract all the footage, and upload them to my computer, this was the easy part, but the issues arose when I had to get the files onto my computer at home, due to not having any way to get them onto my PC, as the raw files were over 60GB and would take all day to upload/download online, I opted to upload the files onto a spare SD Card I had lying around, this took over an hour and then downloading the files from the SD card to my PC took an additional 45 minutes, once all the footage was on my home computer because they were all recorded in 4K Raw, this would mean editing them would prove to be quite a system resource heavy, an issue I later realized to not be as demanding as I had thought. I opted to recreate all the footage using Black Magic Proxy Generator, this program, takes your footage and downscales it, and makes it into a smaller format, meaning editing will be much easier, and the file sizes are much smaller, this process took 2 hours - next time I would have planned to do this the night before I begin editing, to allow me more time to upload/download and generate the proxies of my footage, which then allows me to next time begin uploading straight away.

I started off the post-production phase color-correcting the footage, due the exposure being way too low on the cameras, the footage came out very dark and very warm. I fixed this by adjusting the color temperature and increasing the gain / decreasing the contrast. The footage look 10x better than the original however I couldn't change too much resulting in the footage looking poor and grainy.

I then went onto correct the audio, we had two set of microphones setup, the first was our main, the lav mic, then a backup pair of shotgun mics connected to TasCams. After the first guest (Sally), everyone else lave mic seemed to stop working,  however, did not lose battery, as the sound Op, Izzy, checked them between takes.

I used the TASCAM audio for the next three guests, this meant I had to try and sync what they're saying with the TASCAM audio, this was quite easy as despite the guests TasCams not working, Poppys still did, which picked up our guests audio, this allowed me to sync the audio with little to no issues. I then started adding effects to the audio to alleviate the buzzing playback in the microphones, I added a De-Esser and De Hummer and adjusted them until it was not noticeable.

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My next plan was to sync up the video with what the guests were watching with a playback on the top of the screen in post, this was tricky because I had no way of seeing what the guests were seeing, I had to base it all off the echos of the playback of the computers through the mics. This took a lot of tedious work, especially when a guest would pause to add their thoughts, I would have to resync the audio and video. I did this 12 times over, with all the guests and songs, I then converted them into compound clips, which made them appear as one single clip on my timeline however I was able to 'go inside' of compound clips and edit them if I needed to change them, this is a way of reducing the mass of clips I have on my timeline at once, as I had over 12 video timelines active at once, reducing it down to 5.  I then had to sync all 4 guests and their songs together to may sure at any point I cut, to another guests pov, they're in the same point in time as the latter guest. Again when a guest would pause to talk, this would mean I would have to resync everyone else whilst the guest had paused their clips, I had gotten the hang of doing this by now and was able to do it in under a minute per clip.

Towards the end of the editing phase, I reaslised that the show was already spanning over 20 minutes, without featuring our final song, so I spoken to my classmates, and we all agreed to only feature 3 songs in the live show, to save time.

My biggest roadblock was when I had to create an outro, as I was unsure how I wanted to end it, I went and looked back at REACT, to see how they laid out their end cards, however as they were YouTubers, theres was not relevant to ours.

I decided to keep it simple with some music I found online through YouTube audio library, and have a simple Thanks For Watching end card! Rendering the show too and additional 2 hours, and was scheduled to be uploaded on onedrive soon after.

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In conclusion this project has taught me a lot about working in a live production, how to properly research our shows concept, given me a deeper understanding into set design and what it takes, working with a camera setup and the gallery and trouble shooting issues on the fly. 

If I could go back and change anything, it would be the camera setup, I wish I had checked the footage after our test run on an alternate machine to make sure we could nail the exposure.

This project has helped in my abilities as a videographer, teaching me that no matter how many times I test run a shoot, or have backup microphones, there will always be something that will go wrong, and that gives me the opportunity to fix that, and further my skills.