EDITING!
Are you enjoying the editing process?
I really enjoy the editing process at first when I was filling in clips and doing basic editing because I get to be surprised by how good some of our shots are when they’ve been put together. When seeing that our work syncs the song Die For You well, I feel very proud and that our hard work was worth it. However, when it reaches to the part where I had to fix the details such as cutting on beat, creating transitions, and making special effects, it gets quite complicated and takes a lot of time. It makes me annoyed sometimes, especially when our lip syncing does not match the speed with the song and I have to adjust the speed of the clip to milliseconds(exaggerated). Also, when reaching towards the end of the MV, there are less clips that I was able to use since we’ve picked quite a long song, so it gets more and more complicated towards the end.
Something I did for our song to make it less aesthetically tiring was to cut a verse out because the original soundtrack is more than 4 minutes and very repetitive. As people nowadays have a very short focus time span, making the song shorter would make it more amusing for the audience.
I use a program called JianYing which is a professional editing program created by the same company of Chinese TikTok and I’m relatively familiar with it because I use it to cut my own videos on my own social platforms. The only thing that I didn’t know how to do was to create very cool special effects so I did a lot research on it. Also, I searched up color grading values that fits our clips the best so it would look better.
Here are some links of my research:
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Does the editing follow your storyboard?
The editing does not follow our storyboarding a lot because our filming didn’t follow our storyboard either. But our editing style was more appropriate for our music form of romance narrative than the original storyboard because now we have sequenced a clearer narrative going through. The previous storyboard did not divide the MV into sections to show the different feelings of the actor, it was only separated into different scenes. However now, people could understand that the main character (Shirley) is willing to die for whom (Justin) and why (because he gives her the memory and feeling no one else does) after watching the whole thing due to our change of shooting and editing.
In terms of Mise en scene, I did not add a lot of special effects to our clips because that will derive the audience from focusing on the narrative. The filmed clips already has a lot going on, I don’t want to ruin it by making it too “full”. I only created special effects on the parts where there should be a lot going on, such as the climax. Something I was proud with was the consecutive zoom effect I created with the different clips because it synced with the soundtrack very well and lures the audience in. Also, the clips engages our target audience a lot naturally because people who listens to Die For You are usually people who are going through a relationship problem and the clips I have put in really demonstrates the things they are going through which makes them have a connection with the video.
In terms of shots, angles, and movement, I edited different shots (close-ups, establishing, mid-shots, etc.) together so it does not get too boring. Scientifically, using a wide variety of shots would make the story more interesting somehow. Also, as our music genre is romance, I made a very big distinction between the couple loving each other and hating each other by changing the tone of the clip and length of cut. I also did a lot of editing to the beat because our music has a strong tempo. The impact that this creates is that the it syncs into the soundtrack as if the song was made for the video instead of making it seem like two separate things.
Our soundtrack was edited shorter so the audience wouldn’t get the feeling of “why isn’t this ending” because the original soundtrack has three climax of “die for you” which means that we need to think of at least 6 changing points in the MV (The Todorov equilibrium to equilibrium disrupted to equilibrium theory). For a narrative romance MV, having too much change would make people confused.
Overall: Is the editing successful?
I believe the editing is quite successful at the end because I started off with a really bad sequence when we did not have that many shots. After shooting more and more, the MV starts to get more interesting and I could get in the color grading, special effects, etc. I think the best thing that worked well was that I had very good shots for the climax parts and the two climax in the song both had very different editing to make it seem less boring. What I think is most challenging for me is when I did not have enough clips to edit. When I’ve filmed more clips, it was much easier because simply putting in more shots made the music video better.
I added a text filter called glitter when the text fades out. I set the time of fade to 0.3 seconds so that it matches with the beat.
I used this infinite pass special effect with a series of clips to build up to the climax. It is a very smooth transition.
I used this vintage cartridge filter for my MV as the color grading. It turns my MV tone blue which is the color I feel from the song.
