My second music video A1+ some M2
 

Hello you all,
I'm posting here my second directed music video, this one has a bit of M2 footage (about 40%). The song is in portuguese, the artist is from Mozambique (Africa), his stage name is Azagaia (portuguese for spear). The song is about how the people from the country should stop taking the crap from the government and join the march (A Marcha) to bring down the killers, thieves and corrupt officials in the government. This is a very politically charged song, therefore it doesn't get much rotation on TV, but the artist is pretty popular nonetheless. This video is a prequel to my directorial debut, a music video for the same artist. I will do my best to try and post my first music video too.

ALL criticism is welcome. Hell, please rip me apart, in my country is very hard to get constructive criticism.

Lens used: 28mm 2.8, 85mm 2.8

http://www.zshare.net/download/46744422fe61d8/

aonde que vc fimlo isso foi em mozambique mesmo?

sim, foi em mocambique mesmo. eu vivo ca.

Gostei mesmo, Ernanio! You have some interesting shots there. My main criticism would be the fact that you use too much slip screen, which makes you loose some of the intensity. Also the white diffusion filter you are using feels a bit too intense for my taste (I don't know if you did it on post and can tone it down a bit or if you did it directly on the camera).
Tell us a bit more about lightning, color correction, etc.

Yeah the white diffusion is done on post...The split screen is one of the reasons some people ended up not liking the video much. I may have overdone it, but I had to tell 3 different stories in less than 1m30s and I wanted to cover alot of stuff on them, do you have a suggestion of another way to reduce the split screen yet achieve that goal?

The only time I used a light kit was at the concentration of people. I was using the M2 there and i had to use it. Everything else was just ambient light, which I think is my Achilles heel, cause it's very hard for me to be moving with light kits everywhere, here in Africa we do it guerrilla style. For the color correction I just followed Stu Maschwitz DV Rebel's Guide, using AE all the way, some magic bullet for the white diffusion, and some Rebel CC. This was the first time I finished on AE and I must say I'm very happy about it.

My workflow is to edit cineform avi's on Vegas 7 then save an aaf and load that on AE and do the color correction there. On my first video I tried to do it all on Vegas 7 and learn the hard way that Vegas is not built for all that work, especially if you are rendering in high resolutions. I would get render erros at 80% ruining days of render, so I decided to follow the tried and true methods.

Thanks for the comments.

good stuff bro yea i get errors on vegas all the time & i have a pretty up to date computer... yea the split screen stuff was the only part i wasnt so into cuz its hard to look at 3 parts of the screen at the same time heh.. you could just cut some shots down and fit them all in still.. dont get me wrong though split screen is pretty kewl and ppl still use it like in oceans 13 etc..

How is filming there in your country? are you scared to whoop out your camera in different neighboorhoods? like in rio de janeiro where im from the crime rate is super high I would'nt just pull my camera out anywhere..

Filming in Mozambique is pretty safe. Chances of being mugged on the streets with your camera are minimal, cause you have to understand that there isn't much market for such things here. I mean I'm not saying someone may not be interested in my camera, but they would be getting a camera without a charger, without manual, just barebones. And it's not like they can just go to a shop and buy all the missing stuff as acessories. And also I have the NTSC version of the A1. Mozambique is safer than Brazil in general, that much I can say. People in my country get excited when they see cameras, too excited I may add, they all "wanna be on TV". So I'm usually more worried about having my shots ruined than I am of being mugged.

thats pretty cool.. yea i guess i never thought of that..

I liked it - it's always cool to see things from different cultures.

I don't think you need the split screen - there isn't a lot of time there, but the part where the guy in fatigues is singing and all the people are congregated there goes on for a long time - can you push that back, and then take the story lines and just cut quickly back and forth between them rather than the split screen? I agree that it's just really hard to follow three stories running on one screen -- I think it'd be less challenging from a viewer's perspective to cut a little out from each storyline, and try to cut back and forth full screen.

I'm sure it's not fun to think about that, because your footage is really good for all those and it's probably tough to think about cutting any of it out.

It's interesting you are saying that I should have cut the singer's performance, cause he was arguing that it should have started at the chorus, which on the video is when they are walking towards the congregation. One of my arguments for keepin the split screen, is that I wanted the video to have multiple viewing value, most music videos in my country people only like to watch once cause there isn't much about them, just the artist singing for the camera looking good or watever, so the split screen storytelling would kinda have people requesting to watch the video more. I think the biggest mistake for the viewer is to try and watch all stories at the same time, it's not possible, you have to have the ability to focus on just one...I think before the end of the week I will upload my first music video which is very much linked to this video cause I'm appreciating the criticism.

Edit: http://www.zshare.net/download/5403528e513f3c/ ----> A Link to my first video, feel free to comment