Making my Music Video

There are many steps to planning, filming and editing a music video which contains typical conventions and elements found in a music video. I found it easiest to look for music first, because I thought it would be easier to base the video around the music instead of the other way around. Watching existing music videos also provided inspiration and ideas for my own. In the end I settled on the song "Sweet Lovin'" by Sigala, because I felt this song had a happy feeling and reminded me of summer. Through watching and listening to these music videos, I realised I wanted to create a light-hearted and carefree style video, with no worries or seriousness involved. 

I started planning by writing a check list - what I wanted to include in the video and the style of filming to be used. Considering my feeble budget and lack of experience, I chose a location close to home and chose two of my friends to be included; I wanted to get the feeling of a group of teenage friends with no worries having fun in general. As for the filming style, I chose to film in the afternoon when the sun was setting, as this created a golden glow which emphasised the autumnal colours. It was quite hard to get smooth, professional video due to my equipment consisting of an iPhone, so I didn't worry too much about that and focused more on capturing the cheerful atmosphere. In the end, I realised that the unprofessionalism added to the idea of a typical day out with friends, because it could have been filmed by anyone, anywhere, as not many people tend to carry around a camera crew, microphones and tripods.

When it came to filming, me and my friends dressed in casual wear; jumpers, jeans trainers etc. to fulfil the typical teenage look. By doing this, the audience can identify themselves with the characters. As for props, we only really had one: my skateboard which I hadn't rode for years. I felt like this would be a good addition to the young person vibe so I brought it along with me and tried my best not to face plant while being filmed. Most of my footage was spontaneous; I decided to film on the spot and didn't really direct it, but I felt like getting natural footage was more representative of people our age, and I didn't want to make the video seem unrealistic. I took as many videos as I could, most of them being less than 5 seconds, because I didn't want to dwell on one subject too long or the audience would get bored. That could easily be fixed during editing, anyway. I took a selection of videos focused on different things: scenery, objects, people, nature etc. and made sure we walked around a lot so the scenery wouldn't become boring. 

I edited the video on Sony Vegas Pro 13 as I find this programme the easiest to achieve the desired effects. In the initial video, I took all the videos and incorporated about 2 seconds of each one. I timed the cuts and transitions as best as I could to the beat of the music, which helps the video flow better with the music. I also added some transitions and a title screen, but overall not much post production effects were added. However, in the revised version, I decided to add some effects that would accentuate the sunlight and colours. For example, I added a Glint effect, but adjusted it so that it is not too overpowering, and this added a nice shininess to everything. The same went for the Rays effect, which casts artificial rays from sources of light in the video. Again, I adjusted it to make sure it was not overly artificial or noticeable. Finally, I added (a lot) of saturation to the video to emphasise the colours and create an overall happy feeling to the video. As for audio, I muted the original clips and added an equalizer to the channel with the music on. With this, I increased the low and high ends to make it more energetic, and also slightly compressed it to make sure all the detail in the music was retained. Last of all, I rendered the video at 1080p to maintain a high quality instead of 720p as I had done before.