Editing Music Video Blog

Editing the music video was a very tedious process. After dumping and importing the footage, I had to lay out the scenes in order. I had to go through several shots before choosing the right scenes. Once I did that, I downloaded the soundtrack and converted it to mp3. For one scene, I created a split screen for the knocking scene. I had to cut the upper scene because it lasted longer than the scene below. The song was difficult to align perfectly with the shots. I had to do a lot of cutting throughout the song. Even more so, I had to cut nearly each scene to go along with the song. Some scenes were even slowed down by adjusting the speed.

A major adjustment that needed to be done was the phone clips. Some of the shots were filmed on my phone. Due to this, we had to convert the phone video into and mp4 video. Then, once it was imported into Pinnacle studios, the videos were horizontal and not vertically framed. To try and fix this a bit, I had to edit the horizontal size from the effects editor and fix the cropping. However, the more horizontal the shot became, the more the graphics decreased in quality. Even more so, there was still a black border around the shot. The next major thing was the timing with the song and the actual clip itself. Most of the actions that played out did not align with the song. As a result, I had to slow down many shots by nearly 40%.

More scenes still need to be slowed to match with the song. Due to the complexity of this, the song does have to be cut in certain parts to catch up with the actions. If the scenes are too slowed down then they wouldn’t look good once played back. The last couple slides however don’t need an exact time frame for the song. This is mainly because the chorus follows along with the rest of the dancing regardless. The only thing left to edit is to fix some of the lighting. Due to the filming being shot over the course of different days and different hours of the day, the lighting is not all the same. This is why it was important to edit the lighting so it transitions smoothly. The last thing I made sure to do was to add some dissolving transitions for certain scenes. The end shot will feature the Sunshine title to tie the whole music video together.

Filming Process Blog-Music Video

Over the break, on Tuesday 26th after school, my group and I finished filming at the beach. The filming for that day took a total of an hour to complete for the final scenes. The following day, I reviewed all the footage. I bought an SD card reader to convert the footage from my phone to mp4. This editing and converting process took about two hours to ensure all phone footage was properly converted. Then, the music for the video was converted to mp3. The filming had a lot of individuals around which needed to be cut from the video. I made sure the faces of these people were not too visible in the video as well. While filming, we had to make sure that the water would not harm the video camera. The weather allowed the filming to go smoothly, with no rain interfering with our shooting.

When the group met up, the director, Steven, made sure to get the best lighting. I helped set up the angles and movements with each actor, including me. To make sure we followed the song, we re-shot many scenes to match the lyrics of the song. Some interruptions occurred like people walking by or birds flying in the shots. Even more so, I was concerned with how each shot would overlap with the next scene. For example, I had to review the last park scene of us jumping to match it to the beach scene. The reason for this is so that the clips transitioned smoothly from one scene to the other. This shot was taken a total of three times to make sure it aligned. When it came to editing, I had to cut the part where we landed at the park and cut the part where we jumped at the beach. By doing so, it’s all one fluid movement from park to beach.

As for editing, I had to review the previous shots saved into the video. I dumped more footage from my SD card into my folder on the desktop. Then, I imported the clips into pinnacle studios to begin editing. The newest editing style I used was applying split screen. The editing took a couple tries to make sure the actors were properly in frame and centered. Once that was completed, I had to adjust a few scenes as they were not correctly positioned in the video. I discussed with my group of adding some lyrics on certain scenes to draw away from the black screens on the side. As a result of this however, the scene looked a bit choppy and the graphics were not as clear as they could have been. However, with our schedule, there would have been no way to reshoot the scenes that were filmed on the phone. But overall, a lot of editing was completed, with just a few more shots to be added and edited for the final product.