Editing Process

As an example of one of the colour schemes that feature in my music video, the image on the left is a picture taken from the raw video footage of my project; I have applied various post processing effects to give the image its distinct, vivid amber coloring.

Using this example image, I will provide a walkthrough on the processes involved in this kind of post production, providing evidence on how I developed the final image and theme that is present throughout my music video.

When filming the raw footage, I knew that if I intended to apply video effects later during the editing process, I needed a good filming location. What I mean by this is excellent lighting and a great deal of discernible difference in detail between the actors in the video and their respective surroundings.

In the picture we can see that the black clothing of the two actors contrasts greatly with the bleak, washed-out background. This provided an excellent editing opportunity, where the colour editing I applied allowed for the two actors to form an effective, stylized silhouette.

Applying Colour Filters

 On the left here is the original footage. We can see that the colour toning of this footage is completely natural.







To make the scene more interesting and visually appealing, I applied colour filters to strengthen the blue tones of the footage.

To balance the lighting, I increased the red gain and green gain in the video to ensure that only the darker areas of the footage took on the increased blue shades. 

On the left we can see the video effects editor for iMovie, where I can adjust the visual elements of the selected footage. Located at the bottom of the overlaying display are the colour editing options, and we can see that I've adjusted them to give the colour tones shown in the image above. Also in the video effects editor, are contrast and brightness options. I adjusted these sliders to emphasize darker lines and shapes, creating a more stylized look about the video.

This kind of lighting adjustment can add to the production value of my project, albeit just an aesthetic buff.

Lip-Syncing

Forming a significant part of the editing process, ensuring that the footage observed matched the song heard was of the upmost importance. I found the process of lip-syncing to be a challenge at first, discovering some of the difficulties in using the iMovie program to create a music video; Often as was the case, an alteration to visual footage, however slight, has a knock-on effect for the entire music video and the synchronization between visuals and sound. I had to take care, therefore, when trimming/adding footage into my music video; for every second that I removed, I had to add back in somewhere else in the music video to ensure all remained synchronized.

With regards to aligning visual footage to each individual word of the song, while I filmed the raw footage I ensured that the priest was miming along to the song as it was played off-screen; by doing this, I was able to effectively lip-sync by matching the first word for each part of edited footage to its respective lyric in the song. I did this on the volume wave level, looking for small changes in volume that indicated a syllable was being spoken:

As you can see, the soundtrack's volume display (the audio segment represented by the green bar) aligns to the footage's sound (the audio segment that is represented by the blue bar). These telltale jumps in sound on the visual display correspond to the words and individual syllables that are being spoken by the soundtrack's singer. To synchronize the visual miming with the audible song therefore, I aligned these rises in pitch/sound to match the song and the footage's progression through the music.


I applied this method to the transitions to my music video also, where a strum of the guitar will be synchronized with a cut, adding a sense of clear pace to the music video.