Editing

We started editing our music video a few days after the shoot day was finished. We were given a time frame of 2 and a half week to have finished the whole music video, which Alex and I found very difficult, especially as our video had lots of special effects. Firstly, we separated the better takes from the unusable one by creating specific bins for each type of shot. Once this stage was completed we then went on to doing the first narrative; the rappers.

By laying down the track on final cut pro it made it easier so u to get a sense of the timeline and seeing how far into the song we could build up the aliens new found fame. A really difficult part of editing is cutting each shot to the beat of the song and matching up lip movements to the actual song. To find the exact beat you would first listen to a short section of the song where you knew the beat was, then once you think you’ve heard it you pres pace bar and listen to the song beat by beat until you find it. Very luckily our song had a very noticeable and dominant beat so it did not take too long to find it, whereas for others it we very difficult. As for the lip sinking, if you altered the magnification size of the timeline by altering the switch at the bottom left of the screen it gave you a much more precise indication of time. By altering the clip one second forward, especially for parts that needed quick editing e.g. repition of the last word in a verse.

Once this stage was completed we then went on to doing the first narrative; the rappers. Before doing any of the editing we put the track down on final cut pro. We then put the first runthrough of the rap over it cutting it to the beat. Once this is done, the hard part comes when trying to layer other shots of the rappers over the top of it as we were only using smaller parts, maybe only a few seconds long. We only had a few shots of the rappers singing the actual song, so although we were limited in how many shots we could use, it made the process very simple with the selecting shots and inserting them, as we didn't have to go through many shots to find a specific movement or action we liked, as they were already in the shots we had due to good direction on the shoot day. We used shots from all of the runthroughs of the song, as well as the short shots of the rappers repeating the word from the end of each line. After we had got the cut we wanted with the performance, we added the other element of the performance, like the reactions to what was happening to the alien character, and the part where the ship starts to fall apart.

I think we managed this well, and were able to sync the rapping perfectly amidst the chaos of the scene. The final part of the editing process was to put the narrative strand in. This was much easier as the shots were all similar, and all we had to do was to select a shot that could fill in the spaces that we had specifically left for these shots, which matched a certain point in the song. Now all that had to be done was the after effects. For the bulk of after affects Alex and used the Keying technique using abode after effects. This is where you crop out the back ground to replace it with an image that is either made on Photoshop or found on the internet. This is a multistage process and is initiated by resized the image to fit the frame. Once this is resized, you must check the lighting, this is done by clicking effects then keying and finally key light. Then click on the button to the left of the green to select whether a green or blue screen was used. In out media product we used a blue background as the green would have clashed with the green alien. Once the combined matte was allowed, we had to ensure the background was fully black in comparison to the white image we needed to keep to put against the background, e.g. the aliens face. For the beginning sequence of the space ship landing we used a basic key frame animation. This is where we selected specific parts of the screen for the space craft to change direction and the computer fills in in-between frames. The start middle and end point were shown as circular dots on the screen.