Media Studies - Lip Syncing Practice

This Blogpost, written by me (Maxi), features my teams experimentation and practice with lip syncing for our music video, which will be important as lip syncing is an important and common convention of music videos. 

We have been assigned a short task by our teacher Mr. Nick to create a short music video in one lessons' period, for a couple verses from the 90's pop classic "I Want It That Way", performed by the Backstreet Boys. I hope from this quick mini project that we will be able to create a fun music video and will be able to demonstrate and use effective editing and filming techniques that we'll be able to use in our actual music video,  and get good practice in lip sync editing so that we'll have a smooth time doing it for our real music video. 

Below are the verses that were assigned to our group (the ones highlighted)

Additionally, here is the rough storyboard (Drawn by Timo) that we used for the video.

And here are the 2 final videos (1 for each verse), as well as the final put together music video that was compiled together by our teacher Mr. Nick, which includes the verses done by our team and all of the other teams in our class.

Verse 1

Verse 2

Final Music Video

Reflection: 

During the filming of the video, I played the actor and helped record some scenes as well, specifically the ones where Timo was on screen. Meanwhile, Timo recorded and edited, and Sharon controlled the music being played throughout filming. After filming and seeing the short lip sync video, I believe we were able to effectively use different camera techniques to show our members lip syncing in a fun and creative way. We used full shots, close up shots, and pan shots, while also filming in many different locations and not only sticking to one spot. This added to the variety and excitement of the video, and made it more interesting for people to watch. 

Overall, it went well but problems arose during the editing process as syncing the shots with the music itself ended up being a bit difficult, as we had not used a clapboard or given an easy way to sync the footage with the song in the editing software. We will remember this when we film our actual music video so that it'll make the editing process much easier and the syncing will be better. Furthermore, personally while acting, it was a bit hard to improvise the dance moves/actions for the whole verse, as there was no precursor/material to follow to base my actions on. This could've been improved by having a specific script/screenplay that actors can follow, which we will definitely make use of when we film our actual music video. We had also forgotten to film a line, which we fixed by filming a last minute filler shot in class. In the future, we will be more organized and tick off lines and scenes once we're done recording them, so that we can see better which lines we still need to film, and keep more organized throughout the shooting process in general.