Editing

I have now finished editing my music video which did not take as long as I envisioned. After uploading my footage onto an Apple Mac, I imported my footage onto final cut pro, an editing programme. I then uploaded the cover of the music 'For the First Time' using my iphone to transfer it onto the computer. After this too was imported onto final cut pro I started to skim through my footage whilst also referring to my storyboard. I soon realised that although I thought I had got a lot of footage to choose from, when these were cut down, there was not quite so much that I could use. After playing around with the different effects you can achieve on final cut, I discovered that I could change the speed of my shots fairly easily. Therefore I have included some sped up footage (the motorway scenes turned out quite well as I sped the shots up by 500%) as well as some slowed down shots. This helped make the shots fit in with the song and I think that the video flows quite nicely. I did have a few problems with the lip synching as I found it very difficult to match up the music with Michaels moving mouth! To make my video interesting I changed some of the shots into black and white. These shots showed the present day and I hoped that changing them to black and white would illustrate to the audience Michaels feelings of despair and his bleak reality which contrasts with the happy colourful memories he has with Ellen (black has connotations of loneliness and misery). This also fits in with some of the conventions of existing music videos which I researched prior to making my video. I also added some transitions (fade in) to make some of my clips flow better together, this also fitted in with the changing of time theme I wished to illustrate, as well as helpfully covering up any continuity errors. I also blurred some of the shots in London as I thought it looked quite good and fitted in with the hand held style of these shots. Another effect I used was to make some of the scenes look like memories. To achieve this I added a border which made it look as though the shots were home filmed. Finally, I used the reverse option on some of my shots to make my video interesting, this is only used towards the end of the video and I used it to represent how all of the 'trying to make it work' parts of the lyrics had been undone by this part of the video.