Creative Camera Use

When we were planning our video we had a few effects that we were sure we were going to use for our final video, but when using Final Cut Pro we discovered more effects that would give us the desired effect we wanted. One effect we wanted to use was a mirrored effect over some dancing and hair flicking. We thought this would fit our unusual theme for our video and gave us some odd body shapes. After making this decision, Lady Gaga released her new video, Born this way, and this video also uses the mirrored effect. Showing that this effect would appeal to her target audience.

(This is a still from our video showing the mirrored effect and how we used it for our dance routine.)

(The photo above shows Gaga's use of the mirrored effect in her video Born This Way.)

When we first started doing the video we wanted it all in black and white but looking into it, we thought that this might become a bit boring and have decided to use some use of colours in some parts of the video, but only minimalistic colours, keeping it as simple as possible. We put colour filters over our footage on Final Cut and also used Final Cut to make the footage we wanted into black and white instead of filming it in black and white. We decided to do it this way in case we decided we actually wanted a piece of footage in colour and we wouldn't have to go refilm it.

(This is an example of using the Desaturate tool on Final Cut Pro, making our footage black and white.)

Another effect we have used but weren't planning on using was the Bad film effect. This effect cuts your image into two and flips them. This really worked for our lip syncing footage. It splits the image so that the mouth was in one section and eyes in the other, with the mouth taking up the majority of the screen. This effect looks more effective when in colour as you can see the old TV look/graininess a lot better in colour.

(This is the Bad Film effect that we have used for our video in the lip syncing scenes.)

In our original planning for the video we wanted to place text over some of the footage either as a title scene or just through the video during the chorus. We chose to use the same font Gaga uses on her album cover as it is bold and dominates the picture, we also found this font in white works really well over the black and white parts of our video. Gaga has also used text in her videos for title sequences in her videos Telephone with Beyonce and Paparazzi, giving our video a likeness to hers.

(This is a still from our video where we have placed a text effect on top of our footage.)

(This is a still from Gaga's video Paparazzi. Where she uses text as a title sequence for the video.)