Editing

After we finally finished filming and picture taking, we moved into the final stage of the video, the editing. We have been editing for a few weeks now, due to the still images editing is very time consuming so we have had no choice but to spend a lot of extra hours at college, editing our raw footage. First we uploaded all of our pictures and clips from the camera to the Mac computers, we then added them to Final Cut Express, an advanced software which is a massive step up from the editing programme we used as AS level being iMovie. Final cut is a sophisticated, advancement of software which enables us to edit to the high standards of professionals.



Final Cut Express

After we had uploaded all our footage onto the software, we began timelining our music video together. We had various shots which we trialed and tested in order to find the best order for the letters journey.  

We then began to starting experimenting with various filters and effects to make the different locations of the letter transition smoothly. We wanted the different effects to give our video more edge, but we didn’t want to use too many so that the smoothness was lost.


After watching "We Found Love" by "Rihanna" and seeing the romantic montage of memories at the beginning of the video, we realised how powerful the opening was due to the over voiced narrative. We decided that this would be good a technique to involve in our video, so we went out and shot various romantic shots between two friends "Lucy Brandrick" and "James Mellor". I then read out a voice over which we recorded onto the Macs and overlaid over the montage. After much consideration we decided to change the colours of the montage to black and white to show a difference in time. This linked back to our AS piece where we similarly had flashbacks, again we de-saturated the colour to show time difference, i think this added a lot of effect to our video.

We used "Garage Band" to create a piano melody to play over the flashbacks, but we couldn’t actually find a composed one that we thought fit. In the end we downloaded "Jar of Hearts" piano symphony and used that, we cropped it down using Garage Band and it actually emphasised the theme behind the flashbacks.
 

Once we had filmed the girls journey we integrated the shots onto the timeline, it took us a while to find a suitable order in which they all ran smoothly. Finally we could apply the final touches of editing, we added simple things that had a huge impact on our video, for instance when the man screws up the letter we echoed the sound which made it stand out and made it seem more powerful. We used a lot of slow motion in order to slow down some of our shots, such as when the girl walks through a puddle, the slow motion enabled us to show the water rippling.

Now we have completed our video our main priority is audience feedback, we will upload our video onto websites like "YouTube" and "Facebook" to get some feedback from our viewers. I have tried to upload the video to YouTube during the Christmas holidays but it says we are breeching the artist’s copyright. So when we go back to college I will make another copy and try uploading it again. We will now focus on our CD cover and either our advert or webpage.