Editing The Video

In this post, I will focus on specific effects I used when editing my video that I found complex and had to research more about.

Editing with the Beat:

➽ The most important part of a music video is to edit according to the beat. Thus, while planning the music video, I had created a specific time frame for each shot, making sure the transitions fit the beat. However, as I decided to add a completely new aspect to my music video, introducing a new scene, where the artist is singing to the camera in a studio, I had to start following the storyboard less and improvise more. This is why when deciding how long I wanted a shot to be, I followed the beat and estimated the best beat transition near the length of the shot and bookmarked it. After I knew where I wanted my transition, I had to speed up or slow down some shots, add other shots in between them and use specific transitions according to the beat of the song (e.g. jump cuts, flickering, etc)

Double Exposure Transition:

➽ In order to create one of my transitions, I followed a Double Exposure Tutorial and changed the settings in order to make it fit my needs.

Step 1:

I chose the footage I wanted to use and layered the top clips on top of each other, leaving the leading footage on top and the footage I wanted to appear later on the bottom.

Step 2:

As the school computers have an older version of premiere pro (CS6), the option of masking using the pen tool wasn't available. This is why I had to export the clip I wanted to mask into After Effects and use the pen tool to mask frame by frame there instead. Once I was done, I used the Adobe Dynamic Link to import the masked version back to my project.

Step 3:

Once I imported the clip back to Premiere Pro, I changed the blend mode of the upper clip to 'Soft Light' and changed the scale of the masked clip to fit the position of the clip above.

Step 4:

As I was listening to the music, I noticed a change of beat in the transition between the chorus and the first verse, and in order to fit that, I decided to add a flickering effect to the masked clip. To do that, I used the key frames of opacity and changed it to appear and fade out with the beat.

Film Dissolve Transition:

➽ As I was using two long takes from the studio shoot, I was constantly changing between clips with different positioning and action, which left me with many unwanted jump cuts. To reduce this and make my video flow smoother, I used the already existing Video Transition effect 'Film Dissolve', creating an effect similar to a split screen, which fit with the music.

Flicker Transition:

➽ During my planning, I noticed a few parts of the song with a quicker beat and decided to use one of my favorite transitions for this - a flicker between two different clips, which I used a few times throughout the video.

Step 1:

I layed the two clips I wanted on top of each other

Step 2:

I counted the number of frames then divided it by the number of flickers I wanted, leaving bookmarks in between and cutting the clips into parts.

Step 3:

I decided what clip I wanted to start off the effect and deleted every other frame of that clip and did the same with the opposing frames in the other clip.

Covering Mistakes:

➽ In many of my videos I used, I had to cover mistakes such as going out of focus and actors looking at the camera by using clips of other videos, according to the beat and the narrative of the video. For example, during the second dialogue, in the best take I had, there was a brief moment where I look at the camera. To cover it, I used a clip of the story that illustrated what I was talking about  ("I left")

Ending the Video:

➽ As I edited the outro of the song to make the ending of the song fit the ending of the video, I didn't need to use any audio transitions, and only added a 'Fade to Black' to my last clip.