Evaluation Q3: Are you pleased with the footage and your finished edit? Is it how you expected it to look? What works really well and what would you change?

I created the finished edit with Noa and overall, I am very pleased with how our finished edit turned out.

Our finished edit

After we named and roughly placed all of our shots on the timeline, I was slightly concerned that the finished edit was not going to match the original music video perfectly; for example, the lighting in the original music video is a lot more changeable, and at many times dims and flares during the shots, whereas our lighting set ups were kept consistent throughout the shots. We corrected this for our music video during post production. For example, in the original music video when the studio lights fade on the band in the penultimate shot, we created the same effect by adding a transparent black title card and used key frames to increase the opacity over time. This successfully created a light-to-dim fade similar to the one seen in the original Echosmith video.

We used thus same effect for the fade to black at the end

We also corrected a lot of shots through colour grading. Adobe Premiere Pro granted us lots of opportunities to correct the look of our shots; we used ProcAmp to make small adjustments - to brightness, contrast, saturation etc. - and the Three-Way Colour Corrector to make major changes to the hue of some shots. After grading, I think that our music video remake looked more comparable to the original video and I was very happy with how it went.

Here is the Three-Way colour corrector tool that we used to change the grading for our finished edit. We mostly used the third one - highlights - as this created a very subtle grading that worked best to replicate the soft colours seen in the original music video. 

Besides the colour grading, I think our finished edit worked really well for other reasons:

• It was easier than I expected to match up Sian's lip synching with the lyrics of the track. We achieved this by taking the shots of Sian/the band performing and lipsynching the entire song and placing them all on a high part of the timeline, matching her mouth movements to the lyrics of the track. This meant we could use the razor tool to snip out the shots and move them down to the main timeline (Tracks 2 and 3) when we needed a shot from a reocurring set up (e.g. whole band scenes, Sian close ups). 

Sian did a great job lip synching on the day, which made it very easy to edit

• Our music video was very much our own. Whilst I was also happy with the footage that matched the original well, for some moments in our edit we used our artistic license to add our own 'flavour' to the music video. 




For example, we could not find the exact actions for when the cool kids were dancing, but as you can see above, we chose shots with different moves that we still found fun and entertaining. 

I am very pleased with our footage and our finished edit, and from feedback from peers, teachers and family members, it seems that other people found it just as entertaining.