Evaluation Q2: What have you learnt from participating in each of the prelim tasks 1, 2, 3 and 5?

Task 1 - Complete an Audition Video

Alex Nicolaides and I both auditioned for the roles of the robot dancers, directing and performing in our audition music video to the song 'Uptown Funk'.

Our audition video for parts in the 'shake it off' music video remake

What I learnt from the video:

• To lip sync in time with the music by revising the lyrics of a song and actually singing the lyrics, so that it shows that you are.
• Creating an entertaining music video with multiple shots, angles and dance moves.
• The great importance of just loosening up and not being shy on camera.
• Editing the lip sync at the same time as the actual song for the music video.

Task 2 - Learn and Practice your performance

For the music video, I had to learn a choreographed dance routine for my roles as a contemporary, robot, hip-hop and end dancer. It was important to rehearse these dance moves before the music video shoot day.

One of the dance routines we spent 2 weeks learning and practicing

There was only a short time to practice the choreographed dance routines for the 'Shake it Off' music videos. We all practised the dance moves at home as well as with our dance instructor Tasha at school.

What I learnt from this practice:

• We spent time with our dance choreographer Tasha, who taught us how to do the dance routines well together on time.
• Our performance coach Jasmine taught us how important it is to give it your all on camera, be fully expressive and not take yourself too seriously.
• It was important to learn to work independently at home on the routines, so as to make sure everything was smooth.

Task 3 - Planning and Organisation of Costume

There were multiple costumes that I needed for my dance parts in order to suit my roles a hip hop, robot, contemporary, end dancer and wearing all black as a band member

My four costumes

As well as being able to borrow clothes from the media department, we had a responsibility to find clothes suitable to wear for the parts that we were given. I was given parts for the band, which was all black, as well as the robot dancer, contemporary dancer, end dancer and hip hop dancer. We were given a costume sheet telling us what we should wear for the different roles and we were given a date to organise these costumes for. A fashion student and former Latymer pupil called Olivia helped us out with organising the perfect looking costumes for the parts we were given.

I learnt a lot from working on organising the costumes, e.g. seeing the great attention to detail needed to get the costumes right, getting the best costumes from your budget and resources, understanding the level of organisation needed for everyone to bring in the right costumes and finding creative solutions for the different costumes you need.

Task 5 - Complete the Remake Edit

Me editing the music video

Myself, Georgina and Gabriel were put in a group to edit the music video. I'm pleased to say we bonded well as a group and uploaded our edit onto Youtube first. We were editing shot-by-shot with a busy schedule.

What I learnt from the editing:

• How to zoom in and out, inverting shots, changing the angle, changing the speed of a shot and changing the levels when colour editing.
• It was a completely different task editing the film opening. Instead of focusing hard on continuity, the focus was more on resembling the 'Shake it Off' video, making the shots look as polished as possible with the timing exactly the same as the original Taylor Swift video.
• I saw the importance of breaking up editing duties within the group on specific sections of the opening itself, e.g. robots, cheerleading, finger tutting, etc. This dramatically sped up the pace of the editing, making sure we all had responsibility and committed to our individual roles.