A2 Media Studies: Music Video Production

1. Music Video Production
Sarah Green

2. Filming
The photos below are behind the scenes of our video production. They show inside the
recording room and outside on a country road leading to an airfield where we have included
brief shots in the video.
As a group, we thought that shooting in the nearby airfield it would give our video a bigger
variety of settings and further the narrative to make it more believable.
The image in the bottom left corner is a behind the scenes photo from Shoot A. It features
Natalie, a member of our group, directing the actors on wished them to do. In this particular
photo she was instructing Steph, the lead singer, to remove the microphone off of the stand
at a certain time point during the song.
The picture in the bottom right corner shows a member of the music department teaching
one of our actors how to play a simple beat on the drums in time with our chosen song
“Crushcrushcrush”. This was very valuable as the shots of the drummer resulted in being
quite realistic.

3. Footage
The first thing we did
when we finished filming
was transfer all off the
footage and images we
took off of the SD card
using a SD card reader
onto the ThawSpace on
the college computers.
To ensure none of the
footage would get lost,
myself and another
member of the group
backed the footage up on
to other memory storage
devices.
We did not delete any of
the footage even the
outtakes as we have have
required them later in the
production.

4. Editing
Once we had uploaded all of our
clips on to Adobe Premier Final
Cut, we had to adjust the
properties of the footage. We
made sure that all of the image
sizes were 1920 x 1080 and had
a frame rate of 25.00.
When we came to edit the
footage from Shoot B we found
that we had not set up the
camera correctly resulting in the
footage being the wrong size.
However, we fixed the problem
by scaling the footage to fit the
window.

5. Editing
This screenshot shows how we
selected parts of the clip that we
wanted to use. We did this by
clicking the bracket shaped
buttons below the grey bar.
In this image, the green bar
represents the length of wanted
footage. Once we had decided
what parts of the footage we
wanted to include, we dragged it
into the timeline by clicking the
film reel icon. We did this
because we only wanted the
visual and not the audio.

6. Editing
As soon as we had placed our
first clip in the timeline, we
added the song. By doing this
we would then know which
parts of the video would go
where and it made it much
easier to match up the music
and the lip synching.
We did this by dragging the
audio only icon into the first
audio bar in the timeline.

7. Editing
We decided to turn the performance
shots black and white to separate the
as live from the rest of the video. This
was a method of us conforming to
conventions of the rock genre as dark
colours were heavily featured in the
music video. This is also going to
occur on the magazine advert and
digipak.
Paramore have also had black and
white performance shots in the music
video for “Hate To See Your Heart
Break”, however, only Hayley
William’s from the band features in it.
We have mimicked this style but
included the entirety of the band.

8. Editing
At first we did not have a video
effect on the transition from
one clip to another. Then we
found that as the very next clip
would be black and white it
would not look natural for it to
change so abruptly.
After browsing through the
video transition effects we
selected “dip to black” as we
thought it was an ideal method
to introduce the darker colours.
Applying the effect was very
simple and involved just
dragging the effect from the list
onto the joining of the two
clips. It allowed us to place the
darkest point of the dip and we
decided it was best suited at
the direct transition of the
clips.

9. Editing
This screenshot shows how
we sped up the clip to 200%.
I felt this would fit well in the
video as it featured at a part
of the song where it was fast
paced.
However, we decided to
remove this clip as it had
areas of blur as it was part of
our original shoot where we
had the camera on autofocus.
Another problem with this
clip was the reflection of
myself filming in the bass
drum.

10. Editing
This screenshot illustrates
how my group edited the
footage from Shoot B and put
it alongside the existing
footage. We placed it into the
video 2 timeline to see where
exactly we wanted it to be cut
to.
The second shoot took place
at a different time of day so
the lighting for the shoot was
not the same or similar to the
previous footage. As what we
initially thought was an issue,
became an improvement in
our overall video. We
changed the new clips black
and white and it gave the
video different dark tones
which in my personal opinion
made it more interesting and
pleasing to watch.