Construction: Editing

The following post is describing and talking about any editing processes that I undertook during the editing phase of the making of the music video.

After I had finished gathering all of my footage for my music video, i was able to start putting the footage together to make it seem like an actual music video and create a story from it. First of all, i had to import the song for the video so this meant I had to convert the song from YouTube so it was compatible with Premiere Pro.

I imported all of my footage into a separate bin so that I can easily access the clips whist editing. This helped me pick out pieces that I might want to use at any point.

Too start with, I put all of my clips together so that it fitted in with points in the song where the beat would perhaps change with the beat. This also let me see how the video would look in a raw form without any effects on top of it.

On some of the clips, I have changed the speed/duration of them so that they would either go quicker or slower, depending on which part of the song it was at. For example, from the screenshot below, you can see how I have slowed the clip down to suit the tempo of the song. This makes the waves look a lot slower and in slow motion. And at another part in the song I increased the speed so that it fits the song a lot better as well. This helps to reflect emotions within the character as well, you can tell that because of the pace of the song changing, you can see how the character is getting angrier as the song speeds up and then the video speeds up too.

I have also added some video transitions into the song. I have used 'Dipped to white' to show how the story moves from different scenes. The song starts off at the seaside, so using this transition helps to show how it is clearly moving to another location within the song. I also used this transition at the end of the song when the song faded out as they worked well together and gave a good finish to the song.

As I wanted the music video to look quite old as if they were memories from a long time ago, I looked at adding a 'Film-scratch' effect on top to make it look older and withered. I did this by converting another video from YouTube into an MP4 and then putting it on top of the footage that was already there.

As this clip was a solid clip and didn't let my other footage come through so you could see it, it meant I had to work out how to change the opacity so that it allowed the film to be see through. I did this by going to Video Effects and picking the Opacity setting so that I could change how visible this layer is. I also set the blend mode to 'Overlay' so that it would work even better on top of the other footage.

The finished outcome of this added effect gave the result below which I was very happy with as it came out just how I wanted and makes the music video look old and worn out.

Another effect that I added was when I sharpened the footage on the seaside so that it made it look even older than it already did. By sharpening the footage is made it look more crisp and slightly blurred, which made it seem like this footage had been watched a lot before in the past. To sharpen the footage, I went back to Video Effects and went on to Blur & Sharpen to find the effect that I wanted. I changed the sharpness to 129 on each clip so that it gave it the crisp and rough effect that I was looking for.

 You can see from the two screenshots here that the sand looks a lot softer and smoother in the screenshot on the left and it looks slightly rougher on the right which shows the sharpness being added to the footage. You can see this the most in the love heart.