Construction Post 4: Music Video Post-Production

Our main product was the music video. Emilio headed the construction of the music video, because this played to his strengths in editing our footage on the software we used and his knowledge of how to create great effects we wanted, such as tri-chroming. Noa and I also fed in our own skills and ideas to contribute to the task.

What we needed:

• A  vibrant music video that matched the energy of the track
• Lots of shots to demonstrate performance - e.g. shots of Casey singing to camera, band members playing instruments etc.
• A clear narrative throughout the video
• A colourful, quirky and handmade aesthetic that synergises with the branding of our other products

What we used and how we used it:

We created the music video on Adobe Premiere Pro.

This software was perfect for creating our music video as all of our group were very confident using the software, having utilised it in video edits before in Media Studies. We are all very confident in how to achieve intended effects; Emilio in particular is very confident in using the platform, and knows how to access all the tools he will need on the software.

One of our first tasks was to make sure Noa's lip synch matched with the vocals on the track. To do this, we dragged the full take from the file on the left of the screen, cut the beginning and end so that we were left with just the performance, and brough the clip down to the timeline. We then used the audio track of the clip to help us match it with the audio of the track. This helped us make sure that the lip synching looked convincing in performance. We did a similar thing to help us with matching strokes on the guitar and drum beats.

We also needed to make sure the narrative was clear. In our music video, we have both performance and narrative, with the narrative sections being split amongst multiple 'dream worlds' which Casey finds herself in. To make sure the performance and narrative did not get confused, we graded the shots slightly differently. Performance shots were brighter and the pastel pink colours were only saturated a little to make the colour pop for the audience to see. Narrative shots were graded more heavily with more heavily with saturation and colour balance to make them stand out amidst the performance shots as noticeably more colourful.

We also differentiated the different narrative 'dream worlds' during editing. We added a flash effect before Casey enters each dream to signify a new dream beginning and the last one ending. We created the flash by making a plain white colour that we increasedand decreased in opacity very swiftly to mask the cut between the two shots. We added the same effect for when she wakes up and when the party sequence begins to signify what is and isn't a dream.

My contribution

During the construction of the music video, I :

• Contributed my ideas for edits and changes to shots
• Helped Emilio edit and grade the music video

Challenges we faced and how we overcame them:

One challenge we faced was that our first cut of the music video was too slow for the track: it included much longer shots and fewer cuts. When we showed this to our target audience, they suggested that the video needed to have a quicker pace to match the energy of the track and the performances. We overcame this by adding in more quick cuts, similar to Echosmith's Cool Kids, which included takes a few milliseconds long of instruments and dances to quicken the pace of the video and keep the audience on their toes. We cut down shots of the band members playing instruments and spliced them in to the longer shots. When we showed the new version to our target audience, they found that the improvements worked very well.

Here is our finished music video: