For the music video, I wanted the pacing to be slow, to fit with the calm song. I made sure not to put too much sudden transitions in the video, but instead add a faded effect or a fade-out white transition. The song is about how even if the world is not ok, everything’s alright if we are with someone we love. So I want the video to have a sense of calm, with some sadness. There’s also a certain colour palette that I was going for. It was cool colours, like the night, with a hint of yellow/orange to bring contrast. This is to complement the cool colour theme I had going on in the footage. The footage is dark, since it was mostly taken in the evening time, which is cool, because the music has a kind of… “night” feeling, with the “moon” and “stars” in the lyrics. And for the shooting style, I did mostly slow movement with the camera: like the panning, tilting, zooming, and even the rack focusing. This is so the style can fit with the slow song.
How I achieved continuity and unity in my video is by making a parallel clip before the chorus. Before the chorus, there’s shots of the boy in different camera movements: panning, tilting, and even an arc. But in the second one before the second chorus, The shots are the same, but the camera movements are reversed. Like if the camera is tilting up in the first one, the camera is tilting down in the second one. This is so the video can have some unity, but it’s similar. I kept the chorus part the same to keep it consistent. I feel like if I change the chorus, the video won’t be unified. And to add continuity, I added a resolution at the end of the video when the girl comes back. It ties in from the beginning when only the boy sitting at the bench. Now at the end, they are together again.
Some of the technical issues that I had was that some of the footage was too dark. But I figured out how to make the footage brighter thanks to the help that I received. I just needed to add the light effects into the footage, and adjust it from there. Another issue that I had was that some footage was going too fast to match the pacing of the song. I fixed that problem by adjusting the speed to make it slower in the footage. And one technical achievement that I tried out for the first time was doing the timelapse clip. It was difficult to make, because I needed the aperture light meter for the camera to automatically take photos while the sunset is happening. Also, I needed to take a lot of photos to get enough footage of the sunset. So, what I did was that I stood outside in the cold for about an hour, while the light meter was automatically takes photos. After that was done, I made a sequence of all the photos and then footage was made. The waiting part was hard, because it was cold. But once it was done, the results were worth it.
The music video did turned out the way I planned and storyboarded. Except for the timelapse one, I just added that in the video because I find the water pouring part in my initial plans to be complicated. Some parts took longer to do, especially the ones that were planned outside-where it’s cold. I’m glad that most of it goes out the way I wanted to.
I think I met my own expectations with the footage that I collected. It was like what I planned, and I’m happy about that. The editing part met my expectations too, because it met the mood that I’m going for. Areas that I see room for improvement, was to improve the quality of the footage. Some of the footage was slightly out of focus and too dark and that bothered me. When I brighten the video, it begins to look weird which I didn’t like. Also, there’s this one clip where my hand was in the camera near the end of the first chorus. I should’ve got more footage, but it was so cold at that time that I had to use what I have. It was unfortunate. Overall, I feel very satisfied with the music video.
