A Guide to Video Editing

Before editing a music video, you'll need to have all the scenes and footage recorded and ready to import. The process of importing video is simple, but usually you'll have to wait some time for it to complete. Videos also need to be checked for faults such as blur, corruption and other glitches. It's also good practice to keep a backup on a different device, or to use a cloud based storage service, such as google drive, dropbox etc.

If you keep your project files on an online only cloud service, you will be unable to access the files if you can't access the internet, so if you're not able to access the internet very often, or your connection is slow, you may be better off storing the files locally on your computer or a storage device that you can carry around if you're working on multiple devices in different locations. Having multiple different versions of a project can be difficult to manage if you haven't organised properly but if you have different versions saved at different dates you can go back to a previous one if there's any issue with the latest file you've been working on.

After importing all of your footage you'll need to arrange the footage into bins, this isn't mandatory but is very helpful and helps you be more organised  if you have dozens of different clips then you don't want to waste time sorting through to find something when you can create bins, which are like folders but work inside of your video editing software rather than being stored on your computer's hard drive.

the clips need to be arranged into the right order. Adobe Premiere Pro is widely used in the process of video editing, and that is what we'll be using. to arrange the clips that have been imported, we can simply drag and drop them onto the timeline, we can also rearrange these clips by clicking and dragging them from the timeline.

When you make edits and changes you should also keep a list of what you've changed to help you review how successful your edit is, and for future reference in case you make any mistakes. 

A History of Music Video

A history of music video and television
Introduction
In this document I'm going to take a look at various different music videos, and I will look at how far they've come since they first started to be used, as well as important milestones in music video history, as well as the impact they've had on both society and the music industry. I will look at things like MTV, Top of The Pops and the internet and how they've all expanded the influence of music video on popular culture.


Early Examples
The earliest examples of music and film combined were called Talkies, these were short black and white films with music fitting the scenes in the film. They would often have live performers playing music along to a film so it was more like a performance. These talkies were Music videos didn't kick off like we know them today until the 2nd half of the 20th century.

An early "talkie' from the 1930s.
Talkies were popular during the early 20th century, when motion picture was brand new and many people in society had not seen a film before up until this point.

Music in Advertising- Let's go to The Apartment

let's go to the apartment (Dáme si do bytu)- Ladislav Rychman- earliest example of more abstract, modern music video, it was filmed in 1958 in Czechoslovakia, its purpose was to promote the product featured in the advert (or in this case a series of furniture products) , catchy songs are used a lot to sell products on TV and radio frequently. You'll often hear and see short clips like this advertising products in commercial breaks between programmes.

 This was one of the earliest musical commercials.

 Beatles- A Hard Day's Night
A hard day's night was a feature length film starring members of the Beatles, it had a story and featured various songs the band had previously recorded. Of the tracks featured in the film, there was one with the same name as the film, which was released later as a single. The music video gives listeners something to watch while they are listening to the song, and seeing as it was going to be used in theatres, it needed to have visuals. People don't come to the cinema to just listen to music, they want visuals, action and story.

Here you can see the band members running away from a crowd of fans, highlighting their popularity at the time.

This music video is a good example of synergy, the song had a music video which featured clips from the film, footage of the band being chased by their screaming fans, and is an example of early music videos being used to promote their music. People who saw the film would likely go and purchase the music featured in the film, and people who saw the music video at the start of other films would be tempted to go and watch the Beatles film. The music video brands the band as carefree, happy and youthful, a strategy that the producers saw as effective which I think attracts their target audience and shapes the perception people will have of the band.

Abba-Mamma Mia- The editing in this music video is very basic, rather than telling a story through visuals, the lyrics have more importance. The song is about falling in love, what I think makes this music video so popular is that it's relatable for many people, letting a lover leave. For the time the appearance of the band was considered glamorous and stylish, rather than cuts from the film, the video was created specifically to accompany the song, 

This song was released in 1975, at this time TV was changing radically, a few years prior colour TV was first introduced and became widely adopted by the end of the 70s, shows like Top of The Pops were becoming popular, this was a show that broadcast the latest hit songs to people, they would have live performances by artists, as well as broadcasting the new medium of music video. This was the start of music television becoming more mainstream.



 Queen- Bohemian Rhapsody- This song is quite well known, the music video stands out through its use of lighting mainly, the scene is dark and only the faces of the band are lit from ceiling lights. there is some basic editing, such as fade transitions,

In the video this effect where the singer's face is replicated several times, and shrinks/blurs matches the audio effect where an echo is added. This visual effect would have been done using analogue editing techniques.


The Buggles- Video killed the radio star- 1981, the early eighties were the rise of MTV & music video, this video was the first music video to air on MTV and is known as the video that started the music video revolution. The message of this music video is to highlight how people at the time felt about music television, they believed it would make music/radio obsolete, which never happened. The singer is reminiscing of simpler times, being nostalgic about radio and other things that people at the time would think about.


The start of the video is interesting and features a lot of things going on, after about a minute the video consists of mainly filler footage; video used to fill the gap for the rest of the song. Because of how music videos were advertised on TV, most music videos had a lot of content at the start because this was the part of the music video likely to be aired, songs typically weren't played in full on music TV.






Blue Oyster Cult- Don't Fear the Reaper- This song and the music video were released a few years prior to the launch of MTV, the editing in the music video was very simple, a lot like that in Bohemian rhapsody. There are LED lights used to symbolize the business of city life and how there are so many people in the world, and we all die eventually. different things relating to the song, a story of love and death is told in this video, the lighting has the effect of making the singer appear alone in the darkness, as the rest of the band is slowly revealed behind him.  I think the music video is fairly simple compared to the song, and a lot of footage is filler of the band performing. The purpose of this music video is more to accompany the song, this video has some symbolism whereas modern music videos are more elaborate, the video was probably made after the song became successful so that it could be featured Top of The Pops or another chart show on TV at the time this was made.

Michael Jackson- Thriller
The music video to Michael Jackson's Thriller is very well known, for the time the budget for the music video was large, five hundred thousand dollars at the time, which is about 1 million 2 hundred thousand dollars in today's money due to inflation. Before this, music videos weren't really big budget things, most, like Bohemian Rhapsody, A Hard Day's night etc. were low budget, and either told a narrative story, or showed the band playing their song with some simple effects added in. What Thriller did that is different from conventional music videos as it had choreographed dancing and singing, which was synchronised to the music & it told a story. There were developed characters and a plot revolving around a rather cliche horror movie concept, but it was unique as a music video. Another thing that made Thriller different from conventional music videos is the length, Thriller is 15 minutes long which is much longer than the typical 3-4 minute music videos that were common. What I like is how the movie has an Inception like story where the narrative goes from a girl being chased by a werewolf, to a girl watching the movie, to the girl waking up realising the previous events of the film were in a dream. During more intense parts of the music video, the music stops playing and is replaced by a song that sounds more like it's from a horror film.

 



Aha- Take on me- very popular song from the 80s, the music video was unique and memorable because of the art style, the video combines live action video with hand drawn, frame by frame animation. It starts with a sequence of still images from a comic book,  a woman is reading it in a café and gets to a page where there's an illustration of a man, he winks at her, then the man in the comic comes to life.

 Using a combination of real film and hand drawn, frame by frame illustration, his hand appears to be reaching out of the page of the comic book and inviting the woman into his world.  I think this video is quite creative with its use of animation, and the combination of both live action and stop motion video creates a link between the real world and an imaginary one. I think that it embodies the feeling we all get that fantasy could become real, in this video the woman could be quite lonely and wishing that this fictional hero could come to life and live with her.

Near the end of the video the man helps her escape from this world after some villains chase them, she manages to get out but he's left behind and she rushes home to read the end of the comic to see what happens to him. When it turns out that he's been killed she gets upset, but there's a twist at the end where he escapes into the real world, a happy ending to a short story and a memorable music video thanks to the combination of unique visual aesthetics and story.



money for nothing- commenting on music video, controversial lyrics, first cgi music video
This music video was made during the early years of MTV in 1985, what set this video apart from others is how advanced the different production techniques were that were featured in it were. At the beginning of the video there's a scene featuring CGI, for the time this video was made computer animation would have been incredibly expensive the process of creating it would've been very slow.

this screenshot is taken from the first scene in the video, the CGI has not aged well, a lot like other things from the 80s, the characters look very boxy, this is because computers at the time were not cabable of producing images with lots of polygons, today, CGI animation like this could easily be produced by anybody on a regular laptop using free software, but during the 80s it would've had to have been produced on an expensive, state of the art workstation. This video must have amazed people back when it was released, the movie Toy Story did not come out until 10 years later, and it just shows how far computers have come even back then. 

This next scene in the video features live action footage of the band playing their instruments, this part is very flashy and vibrant with its use of colour correction to highlight objects and instruments. as well as digital drawing. The video then goes back into the realm of CGI, a man is watching the band play on a TV and complaining about how musicians aren't really working hard and that they're getting money for essentially doing nothing/for free.

"The little faggot got his own jet air plane"

there's controversy over the lyrics in the video, it's highlighting the attitude people in general had towards people working in creative professions at the time, such as artists, filmmakers etc. society had a different view of what hard work meant: working a dull and tedious job that required hard labour, it wasn't considered to be something that was entertaining/fun to do. The CGI character in the video is voiced by the lyrics of the song, he's working a hard job and sees Dire Straights performing on TV and is likely envious of how much money they make as performers.

Ridley Scott-
Today many people know Ridley Scott as a famous movie director, responsible for films such as Prometheus, The Martian, Alien and many more films that became international blockbusters His movies are remembered because they're often dark and atmospheric, he makes a lot of science fiction films, Blade Runner for example: set in a dystopian future, it was very well received by critics and the public and remembered for being unique and its bleak atmosphere. Sci-Fi hadn't really been done  on such a huge scale prior to this film, with a budget of 28 million US dollars, even Alien: a previous film directed by Ridley Scott had nowhere near the scale of resources put in, Blade Runner had huge sets and backdrops, during this time CGI wasn't available for filmmakers as the technology wasn't there, so filmmakers relied more on physical props, pyrotechnics, animatronics and matte paintings, all of which took a long time to produce and were much more difficult than using digital alternatives available today.

"1984", for Apple
This commercial was a huge success and was shown during the superbowl break, a huge football event in the USA. The commercial was powerful and had the message: Think different, it was made for Apple to sell their computers and it has a woman running through a room of brainwashed people to destroy a screen that was brainwashing them, it was very dystopian and futuristic, like a lot of Ridley Scott's movies. While Apple is a company this 'think different' marketing worked well for them and helped them become a famous brand name.

Cage the Elephant- Ain't No Rest for the Wicked
This music video starts off with a lot of distortion and visual effects to make it appear like the camera's broken, and a lot of other things are done in such a way to make the video look this way,

The meaning behind the song Ain't no rest for the wicked is that people aren't perfect and we're all capable of committing crimes, everybody has times in their life when they're poor and have to do things to make ends meat. In the lyrics a story is told of the singer meeting and seeing different people, the first person he meets is a young woman who says

"If you pay the right price your evening will be nice"

, it's implied that she's a prostitute. 

The second person he meets is a man that sneaks up behind him with a gun, threatening to kill him if he doesn't hand over his money, he asks what made him want to live this kind of life and he repeats the chorus 'Ain't no rest for the wicked'
  


Romain Guras- Born Free/Justice Stress- Romain Guras is a modern music video director, and his music videos are very postmodern or avant garde. Born Free and Justice Stress both have videos that are extremely violent and controversial, and the technique of shock horror is used to convey a statement about society, modern film and music videos are able to get away with much more than they would be able to 10-20 years ago, while TV and radio had standards as to what they would broadcast, the internet came along and platforms like YouTube enabled content creators to explore more adult themes, society in general these days is desensitised to violence and other adult themes, so Romain Guras' videos have much less of an impact  than they would if they were released 10-20 years ago. 

In Born Free the topic of systematic discrimination/persecution is brought up, using ginger people to represent the oppressed. The police behave harshly towards them, I think ginger people are used because they have a distinctive look, and it's implying that any group, be it a majority or a minority can be targeted and mistreated by the state. 


In Justice Stress the video is focused on restless youths in multicultural France, they go about the city attacking people, vandalising things and causing trouble. The camerawork in this film is done in a way that makes it appear like a documentary, the camera is very shaky and handheld giving it an authentic feel as if the cameraman is following the group throughout their day. This video is also very harsh and edgy, as if the director is trying to provoke a reaction of fear or anger from the viewer.

October feedback

Discuss in camera editing

Use the assignment brief which is on MOODLE to guide you.

Parallel editing / cross cutting

Copy City of God into the one post.

Put in your own short films and explain how you have you have demonstrated the principles of video editing.

You are an enthusiastic student who enjoys the subject, particularly the practical elements. You are making steady progress and need to ensure that your written work reflects the work covered in class. 

You have outlined the historical developments of film editing and now need to reflect on how you have demonstrated these principles in your own short films.

More detail is needed in the blog posts to gain merit and distinction criteria.  Extended learning activities need to be carried out fully.

You now have some specific SMART targets and aim for the highest grades.

History of film editing

A brief history of  early film

Thomas Edison

Thomas Edison was well known for inventing/patenting many different things (he accumulated over 2,000 patents in his lifetime) throughout the late 19^th and early 20^th century,  He developed many items that we now take for granted, such as the light bulb, the phonograph (an old device used to play music), various different communication devices like the telephone, and the Kinetigraph, a device used to capture film, as well as the kinetiscope: which was a box that you would look into through the top, and would display moving pictures.

Here's an old video showing the kinetiscope in action.

Film at this time was brand new, and was seen more like a magic trick, than a form of media by most people. It was exhibited at circuses, and lots of people came to see primitive footage, films shot with these early devices were grainy, colourless and short. they also lacked story and were usually used to just record things happening. At the time films were very basic and there was no editing afterwards, all of the editing would happen in camera and as the shots were being filmed. They would also have to be filmed in a strict order.

Lumiere Brothers

 The Lumiere brothers were active in the late 19th and early 20th century, they made films which were very basic, with very little editing or effects, but  their work was still ground-breaking at the time. The two brothers worked with photography to start with, after they saw a film made by Thomas Edison they were inspired to develop their own. The Lumiere brothers were responsible for the development of in camera editing, which is the process of editing all shots in a film in camera meaning nothing could be changed afterwards, this process would take lots of planning as everything would have to be done in real time. Modern editing is done using computers so shots can be filmed and easily changed afterwards.


Some of the basic rules of film were started with the Lumiere brothers, such as the 180 degree rule

This is a basic rule that helps keep continuity in a film, shots need to have characters on the same side of the screen as the previous shot, the camera needs to be positioned on the green line and actors need to keep the same position relative to the camera because if they suddenly jumped to the other side it would break continuity, and it would also be confusing for the viewer, this is known as a jump cut.

George Meliere

 George Meliere was another early filmmaker, what set his films apart from others was his creative approach, his films would have a narrative and a story, rather than just being recordings of people's daily lives, which was what most films at the time were.



His film A trip to the Moon is one of the earliest films to implement props, use effects and backdrops to create a fictional environment. The use of painted backdrops was an effective way of creating a scene at the time, if a director wanted to film on a certain location they might not be able to afford it back then, so they used backdrops which were much cheaper. Meliere's depiction of the moon was fantasy, which was unique at the time he made this film.  




There are examples of in camera editing in A Trip to The Moon, such as the parts when the creatures are chasing the people back to their space ship, the man hits one of them and it appears as if it turns into a cloud of dust, to create this effect the film would have been cut so the man hits the creature, another shot is inserted where the creature is off screen and some sort of powder is used to make smoke, and that shot is edited into the shot before it. This is a lot like stop motion films, where something is recorded or a picture is taken, then things are moved around before the next clip in order to create continuity with the two clips.

This is a very short practice film we made in a group, we used digital editing software to place a background behind an actor who had been cut out from a green screen, which is something I think we need to improve at working with. There is also some other basic editing  in this, we put separate shots together, edited ends from shots so that things don't loop, then we put them all together.

Edwynd Porter

Edwynd Porter was another innovative film maker of the early 20th century, he was behind many films such as the great train robbery. Edwynd's films were some of the first to be feature length, and focused on a story/narrative. His films featured a lot of in camera editing, like a lot of other early film directors. The Great Train Robbery was one of the earliest book to film adaptations and was very successful at the time. Porter's films usually featured one shot per scene, which meant that the camera wasn't moved around too often and would stay in one place for long periods throughout the film. The shots were spliced together once the length of the film was finished. Splicing is a technique in editing where you take two shots or more and simply join them together.

The Great Train Robbery's clips would be spliced together by hand, the film reel was stuck onto the end of a previous clip. Thanks to modern digital editing technology splices are simply dragged and dropped onto a timeline, shots are easily combined into sequences.

Sergei Eisenstein

Sergei Eisenstein moved onto film after studying to be a mechanic for a long time, his father and father before him were all engineers/mechanics however Sergei wanted to break the tradition and so he got involved in film. He was responsible for developing the formula for film montages- which is a method used by many film directors today to slow down or speed up time by using a sequence of different shots set to music. 

An example of montage can be found in the film Battleship Potemkin, which is one of Eisenstein's most famous (and notorious) creations, at the time of its creation it was banned across Russia and the USA. It depicts political/historical scenes from the Bolshevik revolution, where in Russia the royal family were ousted by the Bolsheviks, this was a very controversial topic at the time. There is quite a lot of shot variation in this scene, lots of shots are used quite rapidly from lots of different angles on different subjects to portray the stress/panic of the scene.

Eisenstein says that montage is a mix of different elements that relate to one another: "a purposeful 'fusion' of compositional elements together with a generalized 'countour' of the image." -Eisenstein

Here is a scene from the movie Battleship Potemkin, the Odessa Steps scene. In this scene separate shots have been edited together to create a continuous and meaningful scene, this is what all montages do in modern films. Montages are focused on showing rather than telling, and feature no dialogue (usually set to music) montages also manipulate diegetic time and space so that footage, sound etc. that is diegetic is either sped up or slowed down, this can be achieved by playing shots in slow/fast motion, skipping or repeating shots from different angles etc. In the Odessa Steps scene time is slowed down so that the baby rolling down the steps scene is much longer than reality, it's slowed down, and multiple cameras have been used to repeat the same point in time from different angles.

Walter Murch

He was a director responsible for more modern films such as apocalypse now,  the intro to this film has a lot of connotations, the part with the helicopter transitioning to a ceiling fan I think shows the man in the intro as traumatized by war, and the fan could perhaps be a trigger like what happens to people with PTSD. It could also be a metaphor like is used in Eisenstein's work.

We made a short film exploring manipulation of diegetic time, there are some issues that I've noticed that affect continuity, such as actors swapping places between shots, but this was a practice, and we've explored diegetic time in the part of the film where there's a lemon rolling down the stairs, we had to shoot that part of the film several times to get multiple different shots, alternatively we could have used multiple cameras at once to record different shots from different points of view. Then we edited these separate shots together so that the time it took for the lemon to reach the bottom of the stairs seemed much longer, without slowing down any of the footage.

This is our short film.

City of God- Modern Editing Style

Background

The film was released in 2003,  and is set in Rio De Ginero, in the favela/shanty town, it was directed by  Fernando Meirelles, and edited by Daniel Rezende. the theme of the film is life in a run down, poor favela in Rio De Ginero. This film is a more modern part of film history, and is the only film in this list to use digital editing, there are a lot of effects in this film that were not possible at the time other films in this list were made. some of the effects such as brightness and additional glare would have to be done in camera for older films, but using digital editing the editors were able to just apply effects to City of God.

Scenes

The editing in the film is very sporadic and lacks continuity,  this creates a feeling that the scene is fast paced which is typical of films edited with a modern style. Modern audiences tend to have a shorter attention span and prefer quick, flashy, action packed films that get to the point quickly. Modern films are mainly focused on action, City of God is very dramatic and action packed both in terms of the theme of the film (life in the fast paced streets of Rio) and the editing is also done in a way that makes the film more related to the genre.

Chicken Scene

a group of young people are chasing a chicken, and the editing helps make this scene more energetic and intentionally confusing, the lighting is also quite harsh at times. The cuts don’t really show all of what’s happening at once, they jump from shots of the chicken to a man laughing to kids running down the street, which makes it even more hectic. 

 We had a go as a group making a film around the concept of a chase, using influences from City of God. We attempted to create a relationship to the genre of action using lots of short, fast paced shots, without any sort of transition to create jump cuts, the shots of the lemon rolling involved us refilming some of the same things but from a different angle, this alters diegetic time so that it is longer, but it is more lively because the shots quickly switch between repeated shots from different angles.