Week 5 - Practical Tips for Filming and Editing Processes

Grace Watson
2 March 2021
Media Studies
Week 5 - Practical Tips for Filming and Editing Processes

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Linked below is a video I watched and wrote some notes on in terms of practical tips and tricks to keep in mind throughout the filming and editing processes of creating my music video.

Practical Tips I will keep in mind and include:

• It's a great idea to have a couple of different locations; day and/or night, outside and/or inside, but one base performance that you can always rely on and cut back to if needed.
• To do this, get the artist to sing the whole song for the camera and make sure they’re in focus and in frame throughout the entire shot. This can be done using a tripod or even just a hand-held camera - doesn’t really matter.
• Very important and helpful tip(!) is to have the actual song you’re shooting the music video for playing out on set whilst filming the artist singing along. They can lip-sync to the song or even just sing normally to the song whilst filming. Damon Cooper from the video linked above suggests rather just getting the artist to sing along normally to the actual song that’s playing on set instead of lip syncing, because quite often the lip-syncing can come across staged and unrealistic. Later, in post-production and editing, the sound of the clips will be silenced anyway so only the music track is heard.
• It's for this reason that you also don't need to worry about the quality of audio whilst filming the performance shots, but keep the sound rolling throughout these shots anyway.
• It's a really good idea to always get a long shot/wide angle and additionally a close up shot of the same location for each location. This enables you to “mix it up in post”(production), according to Damon Cooper.
• ‘Finer-Cut Pro Ten’ and 'Adobe Premier Pro' are two editing software's that can be used for post-production editing - we use 'Adobe Premier Pro'. 
• Once all the footage is loaded onto the computer and then Adobe, name the different scenes shot. Once all the scenes and angles are all named and defined, we'll then need the original song that is going to be played in the music video. Add this to the mix.
• Then, select all of the clips, including the audio, and create a 'multicam' sequence.
• Remember at this point to click the setting to ‘use audio for synchronisation’. 
• Since you would've played the audio throughout the entire performance and got continuous shots of the artist singing, it becomes far easier to synchronise the various shots to the audio in editing and post-production.
• A couple of seconds later we’ll have one clip which combines all of our different scenes with the different performance shots and audio. All the shots will be synced with the audio. 
• Within the final cut it’s really easy to edit and alter the order of the performance shots without changing the audio as well, as long as you’ve clicked the setting to ensure that only the order of the videos is rearranged. 
• We can then add transitions, effects and colour gradients. Annnddd, whalla!