Construction Post 4: Music Video Post-Production

We edited our music video using Adobe Premiere Pro which we used last year for the AS and at GCSE.

Me editing on Adobe Premiere Pro

We stared by watching our rushes through and renaming them in their folders of day and time they were shot and uploaded. Although it was good that we had a lot of different takes and therefore choice, this did mean it took us a lot longer than we would have liked to rename them all. From there we chose the best overall take for each lipsync and synced them with our track so that when we needed a shot we could just cut in and out of what was already there and it was already synced, saving time later down the line.





We decided as a group to share the responsibility for completing each of the products, so that we all had a good amount of time to work on each. During the last week though, with the deadline approaching, we all took the product we were quickest at doing and went where we were most skilled to ensure we finished on time. For the edit my main contribution was editing the second half of the video, the dance break, grading and fine tuning the cuts throughout.

Changes from test edit

One of the big changes we made from the test edit was being more daring with our framing choices and how they worked together. For example in our test it tended to get visually boring with mainly just MLS and MS but in our real edit we made sure to be a bit more daring and actually follow music video editing conventions of going from CUs to LS - really varied framing.

Below you can see a comparison of the framing we had for the test and real edit.

Example of similar framing throughout test edit

More varied framing in real edit

Another change from the test edit was the addition of fades to and from black as transitions. Laith edited a lot of these in and we think it works really well, having been done in a lot of R&B music videos and made the integration of our narrative shots a lot smoother.

Below is an example of a lipsync fade to black and the narrative shot fade from black that follows it.

Effects

When we first edited the dance break we realised that even with the cuts to different angles and switching to me and Meera doing the choreography at some points - inspired by the dance sequence in Ne-Yo's Miss Independent - it still looked a bit boring and not quite what we had envisioned. To try and improve this, after speaking to our teachers who suggested trying an effect, I added a ghosting effect where I layered a duplicate of each shot on top of the original, starting it a few frames later and turning down the opacity. Although there is a tool that can do this automatically, when I tried that in the beginning it ghosted the footage too much and as you can't change the levels we had to do it manually. In the end I was actually really pleased with how the ghosting came out as it made the dance break a bit edgier, contrasting nicely with the rest of the video.

Revisions

Once we had a complete timeline and were moving onto fine tuning, we asked our media teachers and technician to look at our video and give their opinion. The main thing that we got back was that they thought we were playing it too safe with out edit and we needed to experiment a bit more. In response to this we tightened up a lot of cuts and varied our shot length a lot more. We also added jump cuts into the end of the argument to give a more trippy feel to the sequnce, which can be sen below.

Laith and I also spent time going through the completed timeline shot by shot, picking out little things we wanted to change, for example we moved the narrative up as we felt that it became too rushed towards the end, and we needed to break up a long sequence of lip sync over the first pre-chorus.

Target Audience Feedback

Once we had made our own revisions and those based on our teachers' feedback, we asked members of both our primary (R&B fans) and secondary (12-25 year olds) TA for their feedback.

The response that we got from both was very positive with everyone saying that to them it really did look like an R&B music video - meeting their expectations. Everyone asked also said that they could follow the narrative and that there was clear links to it and the song's lyrics.

The shots that went down the best were:

• Silhouetted dance shots

• Screen shadow shots

• Quick pan into studio

I was so pleased that these three were picked out as the audiences' favourites because they are the ones that we liked the best as well.

In addition to the music video, Meera edited a short behind the scenes video that includes bloopers and shows just how much fun we had making the music video. This will be used on the website as a fun extra for the fans.

Below is our final music video:

Overall I really enjoyed editing the music video because it was a lot of fun to watch all of footage and to have a hand in turning all of that into a video that looks professional and effective and that we are actually proud of. I got to try new editing techniques and effects that I hadn't used before and had the opportunity to get really creative and daring with the edit. We worked well as a group, with everyone having a say and getting to explore their own creative ideas and we all agreed that it came out a lot better than we were expecting after the test edit.