Rejected Footage

The screen grabs that you see above show all the pieces of rejected footage that we had filmed, but that we didn't end up using in our music video.

Quite a lot of our rejected footage were shots that were unusable either down to interferences that were distracting and would take the attention away from the acting that was going on in the shot, or were unusable simply because the actor may have made a mistake or when we were filming we just didn' t think that the shot was of good enough quality or standard to be put into out music video.

One of the shots that had quite a few takes that made it into the rejected footage pile was the one we have used at the beginning of the music video where Lady Gaga is speaking into the camera (this is the point in the song where Lady Gaga is actually just talking) it was difficult for our actor to try and complete this without laughing and also getting the timing right, this was difficult because there were us other members of the group that were filming it, watching her, so that we knew when to stop recording.

This didn't only happen with our Lady Gaga speaking though, we also had some rejected footage from when our male actor, who played both The Wolfman and Dracula characters, had to do some speaking (for the male speech in the song), he had some problems with the timing of the lyrics, we then resolved this by letting him have the song playing on an iPod, yet also making it discreet so that you couldn't see it on the camera.

We also had some rejected footage from when we shot some or most of the dance sequences that appear in our music video, this is because it takes quite a while, again to get the timing right and also with a dance routine you have to make sure that you are doing/performing the moves correctly and at the right. Once we had got this problem sort we then had to make sure the dance now looked good on camera and that it flowed well so that it wouldn't kind of stick out from the rest of the shots within the music video. We did in the end get some really good shots of the many dances sequences that we have in our music video, but we also had a lot end up in the bin on Final Cut Pro.

One of the other scenes that I have mentioned in previous blogs that has given us quite a few shots that have gone into the rejected footage pile, would be the where we have our Lady Gaga waking up in a different location to where she started out. This had to be filmed quite a few times mainly because we couldn't get the timing of the actors right. Which you can read more about in my shooting diaries blog. We had to make sure that Wolfman ran before Lady Gaga woke up, but not too fast so that she wouldn't be up and looking around in time, and we developed a little system (in shooting diaries blog) that allowed us to get this done more easily and also work on improving the quality of the shots.

And those are the major pieces of rejected footage that we had, that went alongside quite a more shots that weren't used. They all had the same or a similar reasoning as the ones I've mentioned above as to why they weren't used in the final edit of our music video. Some of the other reasons as to why we probably didn't include them in the music video could have been; poor lighting, mistakes had been made, actor-camera operator didn't have good communication resulting in a poor shot, distractions in the shot (people, moving objects, noise etc), things like this may have made us decided not to use a shot, or it could just have simply come down to the decision that we had a shot that we all preferred and wanted to include in the music video.