This document provides descriptions of scenes and techniques used in editing a music video. It explains how split screens were used to show closeness between characters, and how green screen footage of dancers was edited to make it appear like there were backup dancers through duplication and opacity adjustments. It also describes how color isolation was used to make a character in red stand out at a mock night club scene, and how overlaying two video clips at different opacities highlighted the closeness of the characters. Backgrounds were designed in Illustrator and various camera shots and locations were used to tell the story and relationship between the main characters.

1. A moment in the video highlighting the relationship between the two characters. Split screen is used here to show their setting and facial expressions at the same time to indicate a closeness in their relationship. A close-up of Sarai’s lips whilst speaking can connote the feeling of love or passion she has when speaking to Jamal on the phone in anticipation of seeing him later in the video.

2. Here’s the first piece of green screen footage we placed in the music video. We turned our dancer into a silhouette figure (Mask Only using Chroma Key) and we duplicated the same dancer twice then tampered with the opacity to make it appear as if there are backup dancers when in actual fact there’s only one. Post Modern intertextuality is present in this clip as ‘Singnature’ title here represents the credits to the video – posing as a sort of blurring between film and music video designed to create a cinema verite technique (note the widescreen bars on the top and bottom of the screen add emphasis to this).

3. Another piece of green screen footage is used here. It illustrates the main actor singing in green screen. To make sure no green screen was left in the background, we made a jpeg of the colour white and imported it to Premiere and placed it in the video 1 slot . After that Chroma Key was added to the actual video footage and the Similarity and Blend and Threshold was adjusted accordingly so that no green was left behind. Then with the addition of Roughen Edges, the main performers outline became more refined and less jagged. Finally within Roughen Edges, Rough Colour (black) was added to give our performer a slight outline so as to not blend in too much with the background.

4. Here’s one of the scenes we shot in Central London. This long shot of our main performer – Jamal is going to jump cut. This means that we film him walking all the way up to the camera and cut out certain bits in between to give the illusion of a sort of mimicked stop motion effect. Plus we get several different camera shots all in one go (from establishing shot to long shot to an almost extreme close-up). This shot was perfect as well as we felt the walk through this straight walk way symbolised our actor/character had nothing standing in his way, that there were no obstacles which prevented him from reaching Sarai.

5. Here’s a scene we shot in the Drama Room to give the impression that we were filming in a night club. Here we used the technique of Leave Colour to only allow the colour red show and the rest of the colours left in black and white. This was done in order for Sarai to stand out due to her dress being red (red connoting love and passion). However we didn’t realise that another performer was wearing red at the same time which doesn’t make Sarai seem like the centre of attention as we intended. It still looks pretty convincing though.

6. This clip was really cool. We basically have to different clips playing at the same time (one on the video 1 layer, one on the video 2 layer) and one of them with their opacity slightly lower allowing the audience to be able to see both clips playing at the same time. This was imperative for this scene as it truly highlights the closeness between the characters and that the party has brought them even closer.

7. This is another piece of green screen footage. This was a difficult piece of footage to edit as it require several layers of editing. First of all we had to design the background which was done through the use of Adobe Illustrator and an .ai file of vector plant images. After saving and turning that into an .avi, it was thus imported to Premiere and then colour changed using Hue and Saturation and placed alongside the silhouette dancer motif to create a really nice, almost party/club-like clip.

8. During the silent/heartbeat scene, a black and white motif of both Jamal and Sarai’s time together is played. A lot of clips are reused but the scene really shows off the variety of camera shots. It also reinforces the cinema verite effect we were trying to convey in our video making it seem more like film than a video. This scene is like a summery of the video and their relationship rounding it up together for the final chorus.

9. The inclusion of text was mainly due to post-modernist links to films. However it was included in this clip to link in with lyrics. By now (last chorus) the audience already know the chorus inside and out, this was added to aide the audience and seek a deeper interaction, almost like those karaoke bars where the lyrics are on screen – its like that where we want our audience to sing along too.

10. This is one of the last establishing shots used in our music video filmed at the Wembley Arena fountains. As stated it establishes where the party is being filmed at. The fountains suggest themes of love and passion which light up due to it being shot at night time. The shot rounds up the video perfectly as a way of notifying to the audience that the film/video is ending.