Account of our first cut

As we were one of the last groups to shoot our media music video, we had a push to try and get a rough cut done only a week after our footage had been digitised. As on the day shooting our performance element and our narrative element we believed that our performance was so much stronger we were keen to look at this to see whether we should change our main structure of the video, and made the decision to focus on the performance element of our dancers, lead singer, DJ and use the wires to travel between these two aspects as our third element. After viewing our footage, we created different log bins for the different shots, this enabled it to be easier to search for different shots that we needed. We logged several different shots of the girls dancing in wide shots and then more in close up shots and then longer shots of Dan and Kaleem, the DJ and lead singer, in tracking and up close shots which we constantly referred back to.

In the beginning of our editing process, after logging all of our performance shots of the dancers and Dan and Kaleem, we began to assembly the first cut. The first thing we had to do before we could edit was to thoroughly listen to the song and place markers at significant beats and riffs in the song and so we could use these as a basis on how to structure the video. We knew that we wanted to use the wires at the beginning as a ‘lead in and out’ to the different performance elements. We attempted to follow a similar structure of finding a clip of the lead singer and the DJ synced to the music and then use this as a basis and find shot clips of the dancers to cut between. Listening to the music, there was moments of the song in which we realised we should use longer shots in the versus sections and then as the music builds in tension cut between our shots faster to reflect the pace of the song. Therefore, in the chorus’ primarily we would focus on the lead singer and then for the major dance elements concentrate on the dancers in faster cuts and cutting back to Dan and Kaleem. We attempted to remain with this structure throughout the video and I think the faster cuts in the dance sections of the song really work. At the end of the song, again we wanted to reflect back to the beginning of the music video and go back out through the wires creating a closure on the video. The structure of our video I think clearly reflects the tempo of the music, I believe we were able to match our footage and editing technique to the soundtrack, trying to keep the audience intrigued and interested throughout. Several times throughout the video we reversed and sped up clips, which I think worked really well, because as well as fitting to the music it added another dimension to the video. After staying late two nights in the week we were able to get a lot of our first cut done due to the vast amount of work each section takes.
Initially we edited the dance scenes so that the dancers would perform the actual choreography in sequence to the track. However, after reviewing this we decided that it would be more effective if we cut between dance moves and so that it doesn’t flow fluidly, but by too reversing dance moves it kept in time to the track.

Our rough cut differs entirely from our animatic storyboard of our video. Primarily our initial ideas may have been a bit optimistic of what could have been achievable, however, capturing all the footage we felt that it would be more effective and to ignore the narrative and just focus on the performance. Therefore we again had to change the idea of using the gramophone at the beginning of the video and just use the wire structure instead. Again, I feel that this looks better and works more effectively. I think that the decision to discard our narrative element was for the best, despite the long day of shooting it, because ultimately it will look better without it. Our rough cut again further differs from our animatic storyboard in the different shots we first wanted to encapture. We managed to shoot most of the shots that we wanted however, some only slightly differ from the storyboard, this is primarily because on the day we were able to see the different aspects and shots that looked more interesting and would work better.

Our influences to create the music video came from a number of sources and inspirations. Our band, “Electric Deserts” is primarily based on the duo, “Empire of the Sun” whom told a similar look to what we wanted to create. Therefore we took inspiration from their music video, ‘Walking on a dream.’ However as well we took ideas from the French film, ‘District 13’, in which the opening sequence enters through a doorbell and travels down the wires. This was inspiration for the basis of our narrative in travelling down wires between different mediums of music, however was discussed and decided to not be included in our video. I think that our video holds its strength without the need for the narrative.

I feel that our music video holds many strengths and weakness.
Strengths: - I feel that we have successful cut our music strictly to the beat of the track, instead of just ‘photos being played to music’ and with such a strong high beat track our footage holds interest in the audience throughout. I believe that the fastest sections of the song grasp the most attention and are most effect with shots of the dancers flashing on contrasting to longer shots of the DJ and lead singer work very effectively.
Weaknesses: - I believe that because this track is quite long and as we were one of the last groups to shoot and get our work digitised therefore we were keen to spend a long time editing in order to get it accomplished. Therefore I believe we could have perfected some sections of the track, however I am very confident that we have attempted to achieve the best that we could and I am very pleased with what we’ve accomplished.

After our first cut, there wasn’t much work that needed to be done in After-Effects, all we have to do is to slightly adjust the colouring of parts of our video and cover up parts of the backdrop of our set and one or two red heads that we caught on camera in our tracking shots. Therefore after our first cut our work could be done efficiently and quickly and were quite simple.

Here is a version of our first cut: