Rough Cut Editing

Here is another screen recording of how far I have gotten with the rough cut. There is the performance element and you can see how i have fitted the glitter sequences within. As you can see I wanted to have the glitter shown slowly in the beginning of the song so the audience is aware that they're is something else going on. The skin colored morphsuits in glitter does have an impact on people because at first they're not quite sure what it is but they find it fascinating. In this way showing a clip here and there between the performance element will help engage the audience, keep them focused on the video because they want more, and they want to understand.

The glitter starts to built throughout the song and becomes more and more, as we did in our storyboarding. Because the story is that the glitter is invading everything. Because the morphsuits are doing things as drinking champagne, blowdrying hair, sexual movement etc etc. the audience is meant to slowly get the feeling of superficiality and image. In the end which has not been cut yet it will end with the morph suit people finally breaking through the clear wall and then collapsing onto the floor. Here is the screen recording..

Glitter Sequences

After I had rough cut the performance element, I wanted to put in some of the glitter sequences to get a feel of what it would like. I also did this so I did not edit the performance element perfectly not knowing weather it would even be seen in the final product. To make the cut easier to work with I made the rough cut of the performance element into one long "cut" so that it would be cleaner to look at and so it would be more handy for me to layer the glitter on top of the performance element. This does not mean that the performance element cut is final, if I want to change something within the performance element I can simply double click on the moment I want to change and it will take me straight back to the performance element cut with all of the different shots.

To begin with I created different "bin" files on final cut pro, which is basically folders where I can input different shots. Further more I created a separate one for each of the different sequence e.g. "floor Sequence", "wall sequence" and "champagne sequence" etc etc. Here after I dragged the different sequences into the folder that they matched. This made it easier for me to find the exact shot I wanted, otherwise the glitter shots were completely mixed in with the shots that we had of the band. Here is a screen recording done on Quicktime player where you can see how I dragged the hairspray glitter sequence into it's folder.

Rough Cut Editing

Here is a photograph of how far I have gotten with the editing, you can see that I am trying to use most of the shots and incorporate them differently by the song. I also found that some of the shots have different nuances in color, and there are some of the glitter sequences that we shot with a sharp focus that I have to make blurred so that it fits with the other shots and because it makes the people in morph suits look much more interesting. This will all come later, when the editing is done and I have my chosen shots of what will go in the video, otherwise I might edit 20 shots into slow-motion that I might not use in the end product. 

Rough Cut Beginning

Here you can see the first minute of my rough cut editing of the performance element of the band. As it is a screen recording on the program Quicktime player there is unfortunately no sound to match the editing which obviously makes a huge difference, but you can still get a feel of what it looks like during the process of it in a rough stage. I am trying to match the amount of shots of the 3 different band members equally as they are all three equally important to the audience. Some females may like the band because of the lead singer but I can imagine a lot of males are watching the video because they are interested in the instrument use by the boys of the band. You can not see this in the video because the music is missing but I am editing the change in shots accordingly to the different instruments and beats playing within the song. As you can see in the beginning there is shots on the guitar and the it switches when the lead singer sings her first word and switches back to the guitarist and then to the drummer as he starts playing the high hat and snare drum. 

Editing Further

I continued to edit a rough cut further through out the song, with the same method that I started with. I wanted to edit the entire song only with the performance element and the cut in the glitter sequences afterwards. I did this because I knew that since our band has a rock and roll image, the performance element is the most important to the audience as this is what will sell tickets to live concerts. Therefore I edited through the material we had of the band. I did discover that our lead singer some of the time did not lip-synch with the song, which caused some problems with having several takes of her in the climax of the song but I decided to put it in anyway because I am going to re-edit it with the glitter so I can just remove it by that time and fill it in with another shot from either the champagne, hairdryer, bath, floor or wall sequence. 

Here are some pictures how you can see my editing process evolving.

The Beginning

I started the the beginning of the post-production of our music video. As I had synched all the shots on top of each other it made it easier for me to cut in between the different shots and I could try out different shots to see what fit best together and what looked best in rhythm to the music. I started editing the beginning with having focus on the guitarist as that is the only sound you hear in the beginning of the song.

 I had a tough time editing with the establishing shot as we had shot one of the band in front of the gold glitter curtain and one without. We all decided on the fact that it did not look very fitting for our video but thought it looked like something you would have at a high school prom. This meant that I had to edit with one establishing shot of the band that we had only once without the gold curtain. 

Here you can see the beginning of the editing process and how I could easily cut between the different shots. Some of them are darkened as I was experimenting with different ones. This meant that i could try one shot but then if I wanted to keep it but see if there was something better I could try with another one without deleting the first one. 

Here you can see that on Final Cut Pro there are to windows for the images. The one on the right is for playing what I have already edited and the one on the left is to look through whole shots. 

Synching Tracks

After all of our shots had been uploaded we started synching the tracks to the first beat, so that all of the tracks would be synched to the cut. We are using Final Cut Pro for Mac Computers.