Editing

During the past two lessons my group and I have been working together to edit our music video. This is because we all want an input into this product and we wanted to make sure that we all had the same idea for what we want the music video to finally end up like. After the feedback we got from the focus group we had a chat about the narrative and we decided that we should start our edit again. This will enable us to make sure that the narrative is clear and that the main singer is clearly the only singer (which is something the focus group picked up on). We made 'bins' of all of the different shots that we wanted to use and labelled them 'lip sync blue', 'underwater dance (2 girls)', 'close ups of Georgie' etc.. This made the editing process a lot more managable as we were able to look through all of the footage and decide which shots work and which don't (because we had quite a lot). This way of editing was very confusing and hard for us because we wanted it to be quite continous - the only way we could achieve this was by going to a lip-sync inbetween shots of the dance because otherwise we would have jumpcut shots which we didn't want. This made most of the video be lipsync which is definitely not what we wanted as the dance bits were the best part of the video and really wanted to draw them out and use lots of them because of how beautiful they look. However we realised that it should be more abstract than that and it didn't have to be a continous video. We cut some of the video - using blue lip syncs as we decided to not use the orange ones as they aren't very elegant even if the colours were changed. Here is picture showing how the timeline of this version of our video.

After doing this for a day we came up with the idea of getting shots of the underwater dance and dissolving them one after another. This would create a base to which we would add the pond shots and the lip-syncs onto. To do this we first organised on the timeline all of the shots we wanted to use. We split them into seperate catergories e.g Sasha alone dancing, close-up shots of Georgie, the girl dancers together, material shots etc.. This way we got rid of some of the shots that were really similar to eachother and kept the shots that were more affective. This narrowed it down which we needed as we had so much footage. Having looked and sorted out the shots we have seen how a lot of the underwater shots are really elegant - this is something we aimed to capture and by us having so many we wanted to devise a way that would show more of these instead of more of lip-sync shots of Georgie as this isn't very interesting to watch over and over again. Here is an image showing the way that we organised the shots. We have moved them to the right hand side of the timeline so that we can drag them to the part of the song. The reason we have done it this way is because we don't repeat any shots and also so we can compare each similar shot to eachother quickly.

During editing we can see how this has already created a visually beautiful video and we are able to see which particular dance shots match which parts of the music. This is a less confusing way of working because before we were worried about jump-cutting but this abstract way of creating our video allows us to place shots which are different next to eachother and it still looks affective. It also makes it more about the shots instead of the narrative which also draws you to the song as we have edited them in a way that they fit with the music. By fading the shots in and out it creates a magical effect which really goes with the music and the shots. We haven't finished this edit yet as we haven't put the lip syncs up, but we are all working on it so that we all get an input and so that the final product is something we are all happy with!