Editing the Music Video

          Just like the last project, I was mainly in charge of editing. Emily and Angelo don't have the level of knowledge that I have when it comes to editing. That is not a bad thing though. Emily is great at using the camera. Also, Angelo can get an Oscar with his acting. I'm ok with my main job being editing. Plus I have lots of fun editing. The first thing I did was dump all of the footage from my phone onto the laptop. Then I put the raw footage into the editing software. Since it was a music video, we didn't need any of the background sounds. So what I did was highlight all of my footage and ungrouped it all. By doing so, I could separate the audio tracks from the visual footage. I then deleted all of the audio tracks. After that, I downloaded the audio of our song off of YouTube. I had to download it in order to insert it into the editing software. I then cut down the song to a minute and ten seconds. We are not using the whole song for our music video so we do not need the rest. Afterward, I cut down each scene to fit with the lyrics they represent. Some scenes were too long so I had to trim them down. Other scenes were too short so I had to slow down the footage. This proved to be the most time-consuming part. Every time I would edit a single scene, it would desync all the scenes after it. I'm sure there was a more efficient way to handle that, but what's done is done. I also added a cool little transition for the bridge connecting two scenes. It made the end of the fire scene fade out while I made the start of the sun scene fade in. Then I overlapped the two scenes together to make a cool effect. The fading happens at the lyric, "We can burn brighter, than the sun!" I think the effect fits very well with the lyrics. I also added a fall-off effect to the song's ending. I made the volume at the end of the music video gradually get lower. I made it this way because it would be awkward for the song to just abruptly cut-off. 

Filming the Music Video Second Attempt

         On Tuesday 11/25, I went out to film for my music video again. Like I explained in my last blog, my first attempt at filming went... poorly. One of our members was a no show. We didn't film everything that we needed. And all of the footage that we did shoot was deemed useless because of its android quality. Thankfully, Tuesday went by much better. At the end of school that day, we meet up at a designated location. We then all carpooled in Mariapaula's dad's car and went to her house. Just like the first time we filmed, we got there a little early. We were able to record one shot of the sunset, but that was pretty much it. We had to wait for the sun to come down to begin recording. So while we waited, we decided to help Mariapaula with one of her shots for her music video. When the sun was pretty much down we reshot the bathroom scene. I was the one who recorded it since Emily couldn't get the framing of the shot down. It took like twenty takes because Mariapaula couldn't drop the cup in her hand convincingly. I found it to be hilarious but she was getting pretty annoyed. When the sun was finally all the way down, we filmed the rest of our shots. We made many changes to the music video from the first time we filmed. Since we had Angelo with us that day we had more freedom. Also, we decided to make Angelo the main character of the music video. I became the guy with sunglasses. It makes sense why we made that decision. I'm more of the type to be behind the cameras instead of in front. Also, Angelo is way better at acting than me. I'm more attracted to editing than acting anyways. To get back on topic, we had many two shots and over the shoulder shots. Our music video has lots of "dialogue" of the characters talking. We plan on doing shot/reverse shots for most of the conversations. Also, the first shot of the music video is a tracking shot of Angelo walking into the "bar." Overall, my group and I had a much better time filming on Tuesday than Saturday.