Having noticed that a lot of the recent Young Guns music videos have used their logo in them, I felt that to make my own video really look like a video they would use I could add this in in some way. The idea I have come up with is to create a mask so that another video would appear to be playing inside the logo's shape. I would do this in the establishing shot of my video, the storm clouds. I could play a video of the sunset or a clearing sky inside the log to show a clear contrast. Above, is a video I have found on Youtube which explains exactly how I can do this. I have access to Photoshop so this shouldn't be too difficult to do and would add a great personal touch of the band to my music video.
During editing, I found that using the marker tool was extremely helpful to me. I used markers a lot in editing to mark out certain beats and points in which to cut a clip or where to match lip syncing. I found it a really simple way in making sure that everything was perfectly in time and to the beat of the music. I also used this tool when playing and watching clips in the Slug as I was able to mark out useful parts of the clip or parts that were unusable to that could cut away and leave what I needed, especially as some of my clips were quite long and my issue with rendering takes a lot of time away from me. Hopefully, everything is now in time and effectively cut so it looks more like a music video rather than narrative with music playing over the top.
I have started to edit together parts of my narrative as well as having put together the introductory part of the song before lyrics. The first chorus of my song shows the narrative where the character of younger Luke appears to be sending a message in a bottle, reflecting the lyrics. This then cuts to a pan back to the character of older Luke replacing his place, suggesting even though this character has grown up he still has the same habits/life. I then cut to a shot of Emily's character finding the bottle and reading the message inside, establishing the story. However, this was quite predictable and the obvious thing to do so I switched this for a clip of Emily running away from the stream which makes the audience question and engage to find out what she is running from. I moved the clips of her finding the message to the instrumental during the middle section of the song which explains why her character is running. The idea was that she knew this was a trait of his throughout his childhood so realised and went to find him.
Yesterday, I started editing my final music video together. I imported all the clips and audio track into Final cut. I started off by adding in the miming part where those specific lyrics are and the last clip of the two actors walking into the sunset as I know exactly where I wanted to use these to shots. I also sped up some of my cloud shots to create a time lapse effect, I achieved a good effect by speeding up to 2000%. I will next try to sync up the performance clips I have. I have been looking at my storyboard to help with clip timings and where things so be. Rendering looks to be an issue again this year, however I have been cutting up clips into what I need so that this process takes as little time as possible. I tried to render a clip of the band as a whole performing, which was a 3/4 minute clip, however rendering told me it would take an hour or so so I decided to leave this and cut bit in where and when I need to.
Previously, I talked about taking inspiration from Francesqa's music video for 'All I Had'. Unfortunately, I couldn't link the music video as it had been made private on their youtube account. Today I found some gif images of the video that show what the video was like. The image on the left shows the spilt screen used to show the male and female versions of the narrative. Below, there is a gif showing the male and female narrative in one screen and the rest show the performance. I love the use of the high contrast black and white and this video really shows this off well. I also like the shallow depth of field used for the performance clips. The professional lighting looks really effective, however I don't own and can't afford to pay for this sort of professional set up and am planning on using an outdoor location to match the narrative.
As I don't have my own copy of Final Cut on my personal Mac at home, I use iMovie instead which I have some experience in using through playing around and using it to create personal projects. I wanted to test out my clips and see how they looking in black and white, which is what I plan on having my video in. I wanted to recreate a strong black and white, like in the video for 'Stiches' by Young Guns and 'Sit Tight (Acoustic)' by The First. I played with the clip settings and adjusted the levels to give a high contrast effect. I had to alter the levels individually to make each clip look its best as the colours are not the same and need different settings. I also changed the contrast bar to it's maximum and saturation bar to it's lowest to reduce all colour and give the black and white look. I tried this out on a variety of clips and below is what they look like.
I have finished editing together the basic structure of my practice music video for 'Radar Love' by Golden Earring. I am happy with how it has come together and the only change I have made to my original story board was adding in different angles of the drums being played as the same shot for so long would disengage the audience. Now, I am focusing on making the clips look like they have been filmed in the time era that this music was produced. To do this, I am experimenting with using the video filter 'Bad Tv' which creates an old fashioned video style. I have had to change the setting so that it is not over edited and looks realistic. To exaggerate the style of video at the time, I have desaturated all of the clips very slightly so they give that old almost black and white look but with a hint of colour. I think that this looks very effective and representative of what the video would have looked like if filmed at the time.
I started editing together my practice music video for 'Radar Love' by Golden Earring. I am using Final Cut Express to do this and so far it is all going well. I have put together the basic structure of my video, referring back to my storyboard. The only change I have made is to have different angles of the drums showing. The only problem that I have come across is having to render ever clip after each change I make which is very time consuming. For my real music video I will have to convert the clips so that it means this process may be eliminated and save me lots of times in which I can edit more efficiently.
