Construction Post 4: Music Video Post Production

Me editing the music video on Adobe Premier Pro

During the editing of the music video, we were able to gain advice from teachers as well as fellow people in our target audience. The constructive criticism allowed us to see what worked well from the editing of our location and studio shots and what didn't, e.g. our teacher told us that the fairy lights shots were effective at building atmosphere, so we decided to edit together a whole host of fairy lights shots from the studio shooting. As well as that we were told that our initial entry to the dream sequence in the male narrative was not clear enough and that we should pay greater attention to trying to disorientate the audience. This I feel we achieved in our editing of the music video, as we created a great variety of different shot types of Andy in a variety of graffiti environments and foreshadowed the ending of the dream at the start of the dream to add to the experimental, disorientating affect of the graffiti shots.

The pacey, disorientating start to the dream sequence

Unlike yesteryear, the role of the three-wheel colour corrector was not as prominent in the process of colour grading. Instead the colour contrast, saturation and brightness from ProcAmp were the fundamental tools that we were editing for the music video in order to create more vibrancy in the graffiti surroundings in the male narrative yet still retain the same level of skin colour and making the character look and seem as natural and unedited as possible. One of the issues, therefore was editing these qualities without making Andy's skin have a taint of orange colour to it.

Brightness and Contrast tool on Adobe Premier Pro

The ungraded first shot in the dream sequence

The graded first shot in the dream sequence

A running shot without grading

A running shot with grading

One of the obstacles that had to be overcome in the creation of the music video, was cutting down the length of our edit to three minutes. I was able to analyse the wavelength of the song in order to make the cutting out of the last long chorus verse seamless. In hindsight, I feel the cutting of the music video could have been a blessing in disguise, as our original video length of three minutes and forty seconds did seem too long winded.

The original 3 minutes 40 seconds timeline

The newly cut down 3 minutes timeline

When cutting down the length of the music video, I used the razor tool for the track audio itself fine cutting the track to delete the 40 seconds we didn't need and merging the two seamless joints of the track that could flow together.

The Razor Tool

The only real difficulty with cutting down the track was the editing together of the planned panning shot linking the male narrative with the studio footage without showing Layla Obi miming any words on camera. In order to do this I cut the original length of the shot of Layla Obi pushing the camera to the side with the Mark In and Out tools.

Mark In Tool

Mark Out Tool

Then I went on to Adobe Photoshop to create a similar background to the red lighting of the studio shots for the next mid shot of Layla Obi and put that image onto Adobe Premier Pro and manipulated the motion tools let the image dissolve before the red mid shot of Layla Obi, so that there was no black gap between the actual pan of Andy in the male narrative and the panning effect created by the red mid shot of Layla Obi. Obviously, I then had to make sure that all pans were at a similar pace. This is an example of the combinations of different tools and knowledge for problem solving whilst editing. The panning shots I created can be seen below.

The panning link between narratives

Below is our finished music video edit.