Don't Go Breaking My Heart - Lip Syncing Exercise and Evaluation

"Don't Go Breaking My Heart" is a famous duet performed by Elton John and Kiki Dee. It is said to be one of the cheapest music videos to have ever been produced and given the simplicity of the video this is not hard to believe.

For our task, we had to recreate the first half of this music video, creating our own spin off with the purpose of exercising lip-syncing and practicing the use of the editing software available to us. We had to obtain quite a lot of footage, we had 10 whole takes from different angles so that there was a lot of material to use when it came to the editing stage. Despite the fact that the duet originally is performed by a male and a female, our group used two males as they were the most confident in front of the camera. Given how this was only a practice project, I feel like this does not take away from what we have created as a whole.

We used a wide variety of camera angles when filming, examples include;

•Low Angle Medium Shot
•Wide Low Angle
•Low Angle
•Medium Shot
•Close up
•High Angle
•Medium Pan

Also, in order to make the video more authentic, we included a microphone as our one and only prop, this meant we could focus our attention into the lip-syncing and making the video look as entertaining and energetic as possible.

Each member of the group had to edit their own final music video with the footage that we had collected. This allowed us to practice using software that we were not familiar with previously, which will be really valuable experience when it comes to creating the final project. The software that we used is called Premier Pro, and the process I used to edit the video was the following:

1. Import all the separate full length takes from various angles onto the computer
2. Import audio for the song ''Don't Go Breaking My Heart''
3. Cut small parts of from various angle takes and match them up so that the video flows as a whole.
4. Sync these cuts with the audio, so that the lip-syncing looks right and well done.

While doing this it was important for me to make sure that the video looked smooth as it was transitioning from one cut to another, this was not too difficult, but it is important to note that it is quite easy to make mistakes as each cut is only a few seconds long meaning there are a lot of transitions and therefore a lot of opportunity for slip ups.

Overall I feel like the editing  section of the project went well because the lip-syncing was done well for the most part, the video gives the impression that it is actually me and Danny singing fairly effectively.  We included a wide variety of shots and so that there is constantly something to pay attention to in the video which means the audience will not get bored as quickly. One particular point of criticism for my version of the video is that certain shots last way longer than they should, which means that it may be harder to convey the energy and enthusiasm within the video to the audience. Another point if improvement is to pick a better space for filming, we did not have a lot of room to work with and so we were limited on what shots we could use. Overall, I think the project was relatively successful as a first, but there are clear points of improvement for us and we will work on them in future videos.