Editing

Today, 12/4, we finished editing our music video. After a few hours of long work, we finally finished editing. We are very pleased with the overall outcome of the video. Even though we couldn’t use the professional camera that we signed out from the class, all of the clips turned out good, just the way we had planned. I think that the camera on the iphone that we had used to film was better quality than the camera we signed out. We used this camera for the commercial, and i think our music video overall turned out better. There were some complications but the finished product did not show them. The whole process took about 4 weeks of planning, storyboarding, filming and editing. The editing portion did not go exactly as planned, however. We learned to overcome this and complete our video either way.
One of the complications that we faced was with the music. The song that we had planned to put into our music video was Sugar, by Robin Schultz. Because we couldn’t use the camera and we used the iphone to film, it was easier for us to use imovie instead of pinnacle studios. It would have been really difficult for us to transport all of the clips on our phone to the computer for pinnacle studios. With imovie, we were easily able to transport our clips onto the application. Once they were transferred onto imovie, we needed to add sound first. If we added sound after we edited, the clips wouldn’t match up with the words in the song. So once the clips were uploaded, the next step was to import the song into the video. When I clicked the sound button to import the song, it said that the song was DRM protected. This means that we could not import the sound onto the video. The solution that we thought of was to do a voice over of the song playing on someone else’s phone and insert it into the video. This worked out perfectly fine and the sound sounded completely normal.
Another issue that we had faced when editing the video was that I could not figure out how to manage the transformations. I had envisioned the video to have transitions between clips that fade into one another. When I began editing, the only transition that it would allow was to just cut into each new clip. I didn't think that this looked smooth and consistent. I figured out that in order for imovie to allow me to use the dissolve transition, I needed to insert each clip individually. This clearly took much more time that my previous method, but the overall product turned out better. Even though we faced multiple complications, we are pleased by the way that the product turned out. Overall, the editing process was long and tedious, but the finished music video was a product of good quality and planning.

Filming (continued)

This weekend, we finally filmed our music video. We filmed on 11/27, the day before Thanksgiving. The timing worked out perfectly, as it was over break and we were all available. We included our two other friends, Ari and Lucy into the video. Since Ari drives, we were able to successfully film the clips in the car that we had planned out on the storyboard. Overall, we filmed some of the clips that we planned out, but not all of them. For example, we planned on staying for sunset and concluding the video with those clips. However, we did not end up staying for sunset and concluded the video with us closing the doors to the car and waving bye. We were overall pretty successful with the way that all of the clips turned out. If we didn’t like the way something looked, we would film them again and again until we got it the way the wanted to look. In total, we took over 60 different clips to include in our final product.
Overall, everything went pretty smoothly. Every place we planned to go, we went, and filmed the clips that we planned. Only one thing did not go as planned. On Monday, 11/25, we signed out the camera from class, along with the SD card. Our teacher told us to charge the camera multiple times, but we forgot to charge it. When we first got in the car and took out the camera, we realized that we had to charge it but we didn’t. Originally, the camera said that we had 29 minutes left of battery but then it quickly decreased and soon the camera was dead. We then tried to charge the camera in the car, but it wasn’t charging fast enough and it did not work out. We decided to use our phones to film instead of the camera. This worked out in our favor and was overall less stressful than to worry about the camera working properly.
We ended up filming about 75% of the clips that we had planned. For example, we filmed a close up of our friend singing certain lyrics to the song. We filmed multiple of these, and we will cut back to them multiple times throughout the video. We also filmed with donuts from Krispy Kreme, not Dunkin’ donuts like we had planned. We filmed the server at the drive-through window handing us the donuts, us eating them, and a few shots of just the donuts in the box. We also filmed a few shots of us all dancing in the car and being happy, just like the song is talking about. In addition to the clips that we had planned in our storyboard, we added some new clips. One new clip we added to conclude the video was of us waving bye and closing the car door. We felt that this was a good way to end the video, instead of staying for sunset. Overall, we are content with the way all of the individual clips turned out and we will soon put it all together.