Editing

Finally we have managed to decide our effects that we are going to use in our music video. 

Editing decisions

Today me and my group came across some decisions for our music video. While trying to edit our music video, we found that we had a lot more performance shot than we expected. We decided whether to have more performance, or more narrative shots. We found this difficult to decide, but we finally came to a decision of what would be best for our particular music video. We decided we wanted to focus on our main artist, and to focus on him being mostly on camera. So we decided to place a lot of performance parts in between our music video. We made sure we edited it so that the main singer was in the music video as much as possible!

Editing progress

Our editing is going really well. We are almost at the stage before we start finalising!

Editing challenges

Whilst editing, we came across several challenges. Here are a list of them.

• Editing on time
• Cutting to the beat
• Choosing the right effects

After putting our timeline in order we found it hard to go from there. We tried to edit the lip syncing on time to the music, we found it challenging but we eventually got there. We also decided a fade to black effect to cut between our music video. This would cut often, as the beats were quite fast. So therefore this took a very long time, and it was important to get this right. Also, it was important not to miss a beat.

Editing progress

We are very pleased with our editing so far. We have managed to get to the editing stage. We are now deciding what to do next. Everything is in order, and now we are thinking whether we should change the colour of our music video to something less realistic.

Editing meeting

Today was another editing meeting. Me and Daniel are now adding in more of our timeline, and making it more full. We had filmed more for our music video, so we made sure to add this in and then save our work. We also found this really cool panning effect to put into our music video. It allows you to zoom into the certain shots. We used this to get even closer to the artists face. This was helpful, as it allowed us to zoom in on certain shots, the tool is called pan.

Editing starts

Today we started our editing. We firstly uploaded all of our footage onto the mac, and made sure it was all saved and secure. We then save the each shots before putting them onto the timeline. We didn't get much done at this stage, we just flicked through our shots, and began to think about where to put things. We did manage to place shots onto the timeline quite easily, but we took it slow, and didn't rush.

Editing to audience feedback.

Today in class everyone watched each others music video's , and we got some feedback from our music video. The feedback was that people thought that there wasn't enough effects in our music video, and that the lip syncing was quite off time. So we took into consideration this, and we got to work and made sure that these problems were solved.

Finishing our music video!

In today's meeting we finished our music video off. By doing this we decided that we should edit flickers to the beat of our music video. At the start our music video didn't really have any edits to the beat, so we decided to make it more interesting by adding more fast cuts.

We also finished off the ending of our music video. We decided to have a shot of Daniel (the actor) leaning close to the camera, staring into it at the end. We then added a shot of Daniel blindfolded and decided to end it using this shot. This shot is only a few seconds, but we thought it would do a good job finishing it off.

We also watched our music video over several times, and noticed that the lip syncing was sometimes not perfectly in sync, so we then edited all of this to make sure that everything was perfectly in time.

Editing 2

Here are some screenshots of me using the editing software to create the final music video. Here I'm going to talk about how I used the effects on the music video, why I used the effects and most importantly what effects I used on the music video.

One of the main things that you'll be able to identify during the music video is the change of the color from the original filming. As you will notice in our final film, the color of the footage has been changed. This effect I have added for a reason because the theme of our song is a Gothic black and white theme. The effect that I used to make the black and white color was something called Extract. Extract changes the color of the original footage and I played around with the white/black color settings as well as the amount of sharpness that the Extract effect had. I thought that the effect looked well and suited our song and theme for our music video.

As  you can see in the first screenshot, I'm looking at video effects that I thought about adding to the music video. there was one effect that I was really interested in and that was the fast blurs. I thought it would be a good idea to add the fast blurs into the music video to emphasize the sexual emotion between the two characters in the music video. I used these effects during the shot of the guy sitting down in the chair while the girl was touching him and when the guy was laying down on his own singing towards the camera. I thought this would be the best parts to add the blur to the music video to show the sexual emotion. Not only did I do it to relate to the story-line of the music video, but I also added it because it went well with the beat and made the music video run more smooth and less boring with some of the repetitive scenes that were in the video.

In this second screenshot, you can see on the video timeline that I have added the effect "Dip to Black". I thought this was a very effective effect when changing shots and cuts during the music video. I did this because it went well with the beat and made the video and music in sync. I thought this would be important as it shows my knowledge of sync and not only does it show my knowledge, but it also give the music video a sexual atmosphere and emotion with the fast cuts with dip to blacks. As you can see with the dip to black effect, I have overlapped it on both of the shots so it fades to black on the previous shot and fades in on the next shot.





In this screenshot, this is the manager for the dip to black effect. To make the effect more precise, I made sure that I used the effect control to make it more in time with the beat of the song. I think it was a lot more easier to use this than the actual timeline to control the amount of time that the shot will fade in and out. By using the effects control, it allowed me to make the fades during the video run smoothly and not look odd, fade out too quick or fade in too quick.





In this last screenshot, you can see on the video timeline the cuts between the shots. This was done to make the flicker effect during the music video. I did it this way instead of using the effects that were given to me by the software so it could flicker on the beat of the song and make the video look more interesting  I thought this would be a good idea for the song as it has a lot of instrumental and beats through out the whole song.



The effects that I have shown I used throughout the majority of the music video so the effects didn't fade off making the music video look odd. I though it was important to keep the effects through out the music video as the song had a lot of beats to it meaning there was a lot of chances to make effects on these beats and the way the song flowed also allowed me to think of where to add the effects and what timing to add effects. I think effects are an important part of a music video as it makes it a lot more interesting for the audience to view but if they're thrown with too much effects, I think it can be a real put off to the music video so I was sure not to use too many effects but not too less.

Shots of our editing