Editing Process

Editing my music video was a very lengthy process, and to produce my first draft it took me around 10 hours. Because of this, I felt unable to screen record the process because even when sped up, the video would be too long to upload onto my blog.

I used a mixture of Final Cut and iMovie to edit my music video because there were certain features in both softwares that I wanted to use. For example, I began by using Final Cut which I found difficult to use at first because I had never used it before. However, after following many tutorials on YouTube as well as being taught by my teacher, I found it much simpler. What I liked about Final Cut was that the crop feature was more versatile to use than the crop feature on iMovie as it allowed me to change the widths of the letterbox (where there are black strips above and below the video) so I could chop and change the dimensions to keep the video interesting. I could also achieve a lot more than I could with iMovie, as there were more features.

Below is a screenshot I took whilst editing my video:

Whilst using Final Cut, I used different editing techniques such as converting clips into slow motion as well as fast forwarding some clips. Other techniques I used include overlays different textures onto some clips as well as overlaying a film strip effect onto the old footage that I got from YouTube, as well as creating a title page and end card. Overall I managed to stick to my plan of the sequence of shots however I changed some because when watching the video back as an entire body of work, I realised that some of the shots were better suited in different places.

Because I had only downloaded a 30 day trial of Final Cut, it meant that I ran out of time at the end of September and the trial ended. Luckily, I had saved the video so far done on Final Cut and I put it into iMovie where I could carry on editing. I found editing on iMovie much easier as I had used it before yet it was more basic and there were less features to choose from. Luckily, I had done most of the editing so I was simply doing tweaks, yet when asking my peers for their opinions, I found that there was a lot more I could change to improve the video, and I felt very motivated to carry on editing because I am a perfectionist.

I added back the audio for my music video and watched it to make sure that all of the clips were in time, which they weren't. This meant that I had to do a lot of trimming to make sure that the music fitted perfectly; I did this process many times because each time I would, for example, change the length of a certain shot early on in the video, I would have to make ammends to the rest of the video. This is because adding even a second to the beginning of the video would result in later shots being a second behind the beat later on in the music video. Something I struggled with during the process was, even though I had collected three hours of footage, I was finding it hard to find more clips to use. In my shot list, I had planned quite in depth, for example, shot Pride53 to last for 1 second, yet when it came to editing I realised that even one second was too long, so I found myself reaching for more clips. Even though I had three hours of footage, this was spread across around a hundred different clips, so I pulled a few seconds from each clip yet this was not enough and I wanted to avoid reusing the same clip in the video. I managed in the end to have enough footage without the video feeling repetitive, and from this struggle I have learnt for the future to try and get different versions of each shots such as angles and motions, so that you can reuse the shot yet have the same content from a different angle, for example.

One thing I was really happy with with my video was the storyline as I was worried that it wouldn't be as prominent and clear as it actually turned out to be. I am glad that I planned the shot sequence is so much depth, because of this, as this helped the storyline have a lot of impact, as well as fluctuate and build tension and emotion. I thoroughly enjoyed the editing process as I was able to see my ideas that were once just a dream that I wrote on paper, to becoming a real body of work on the screen, that I believe carried a certain degree of professionalism. I created six drafts of the music video and I will be uploading my most recent draft in the near future so that I can gain critique from my peers and teacher to create my finished music video!