Construction Post 4: Music video post-production

Our music video was edited using Adobe Premiere Pro.

In the first stage of editing I had to go through all of the footage and name it appropriately, which took a significant amount of time in itself due to the large quantity of shots that we had.filmed. Once this was finished I began to put the shots down, trying to stick to the conventions we had found when we looked at videos in the same genre. this included cutting at varying speeds depending on the tempo of the music. I also tried to give the video a sense of progression through both the narrative presented in the video and also through only specific setups for different sections of the song, such as mainly using the 'police siren' shots for the "Don't want to feel you, don't want you on my mind" refrain of my song, and only introducing the projector shots during the second verse. I also utilised some editing techniques that I had learnt from editing my preliminary music video remake, such as editing footage to give a realistic lip-sync with the music.

The default screen of Adobe Premiere Pro

 I then got some feedback on the video from our target audience, who said that they generally liked it, but that the colour difference between the studio shots and the location shots was a bit jarring and that some of the narrative shots were a bit confusing.

After finishing the basic edit and carrying out some improvements, I started focusing on grading the video, which I hoped would fix some of these complaints mainly consisted of lowering the brightness and increasing the contrast of the already colourful studio shots to give them a deeper, more eye-catching appearance. and increasing the saturation of the location shots to make them less jarring when edited next to the much brighter studio shots. This final edit was praised by our target audience, with comments praising how professional the video looked, with one person saying "It's like a real video!". People also praised the way that the video developed as it went on with new setups constantly being introduced, which "Kept the video interesting." Despite this, some people had some criticism, mainly to do with the narrative, which some said was "A bit confusing" and that "The acting wasn't great.", but I do believe that the narrative is a net gain for the video, as it gives some context to the video and visualises the story in the song's lyrics.

An example of a non-graded shot on the left and a graded shot from the same take on the right. The dark parts of the shot are much darker in the graded version, and the colours stand out more as a result.