Music Video - First Cut

This is the first cut of our music video. It has plenty of flaws as it is only very rough and was done quickly. However, it still gives us a really good idea of how our video will feel when it is finished. We stuck rigidly to our animatic, dragging in clips to replace the pictures that represent them. We tried to not worry too much about how it looked so that we could just get it finished as quickly as possible and decide what needs to be done from there. Below is a comparison video of our first cut and our animatic so that you can see how we used the animatic to make this early version of our music video.

Ignoring the editing flaws, I really like how the video looks. It is very fun and cheery, putting the viewer in the good mood and conveying the themes of the song well. The colours already look pretty good and we haven't even graded any of the shots yet which is promising. I am also pleased with the progression and the visual difference between the first clips and the final section of the song is very obvious.

After finishing the cut, the next step was to decide how we wanted to change and improve it. Mahalia and I went through the video shot by shot, watching it in detail and making notes on everything we didn't like and how we would change it. For example, if we didn't like a particular shot that we had used, we made a note of the timecode and what we wanted to replace it with. We also decided we didn't like the duration of some of the shots for various reasons, as well as making notes about cuts that looked funny or shots that needed stabilisation in After Effects (such as the opening shot). The list is shown to the left. The notes were in chronological order and we ticked them off as we went through, as you can see.