Analysing Magazine Adverts

Completed Music video

Using a movie filter

To further my editing process I have researched a few effects that I was unaware of with my limited final cut express knowledge. I have found a tutorial on Youtube which talks and demonstrates you through a guide on applying a 'film look' to your music video. A film look is something I felt would have looked good with my style of music video and is also one of the suggestions I received from my feedback along with vintage or aged effects. I attempted trying this out and after a few technical difficulties I managed to obtain the film look by adjusting the colours, applying and adjusting several filters and adding a 'vignette' look.



This is a screenshot of the finished shot with the 'film look' applied. I have asked my classmates and teacher and decided however not to apply this film look to my music video as it creates a blur and dullness that takes away the clarity and 'fresh' feel of the visuals. An aged or vintage film look would have appealed to me as the music video could be a 'memroy' or 'dream' which would have suited the older look. Despite this I am glad to have tried and tested out effects and will learn from this when editing the rest of my music video.

Re-editing and responding to feedback

 I have responded to my audience feedback by re editing my music video. As the response came back saying a few of my shots were quite murky or dark I have been experimenting with editing and adding effects to adjust the visuals. I have looking at using the "colour corrector" video filter effect to alter the tones and colour balance.

Here I have screenshotted the editing process of a particular piece of my film at different stages to show the progression of the image.

To start with I have used the brightness and contrast tool to try and solve the dark murky problem. The brightness and contrast effect can be found under 'video filters' > 'image control' > 'brightness and contrast'. I only raised the brightness and contrast slightly because if I adjusted the brightness too much I found it reduced the quality, and a high contrast created a shadowy and even murkier image.

The next step was to adjust the colour correction as shown above. Colour correction is found under 'video filters' > 'colour correction'. The colour correction enabled me to adjust both the radiance and the hue upon the colour wheels and adjust the highlights strength, midtones, shadows and saturation.

Finally- for this piece of editing- I adjusted the RGB balance. The RGB balance (Red Green and Blue) is also found under 'video filters' > 'Colour correction' > 'RGB balance'. This enabled me to adjust the colour on a more detailed level and create warm or cold tones/overlays to adjust the mood of the shot.


The next piece of editing I started was adding transitions. My feedback from teachers and students suggested I add transitions to help my music video flow more which would suit the sound of the track. It also helps the video to be less jumpy, and can aid the 'journey' aspect of my video.








I  have tried out all of the different transitions available on a few clips and found the transitions I felt looked most professional and suited my video were the cross dissolve, additive dissolve and non additive dissolve. On this shot with the sunny leaves I have used an additive dissolve as the fade from white makes a good transition into a very light shot. It also helps define the start of the music after the wave shots.


Here you can see an example of a cross dissolve transition. This fades the first clip into the second so that traces of the first are seen whilst the second clip is on screen, in effect they blend together and overlap. This I found was very effective on the wave shots as the transition mimicked the overlapping movement of the waves themselves and could also be used to possibly show time passing.

I did test out a 'fade to colour' transition on one particular clip, as I thought this would be a more effective way of having a screen of black or white as oppose to a additive dissolve or a non additive dissolve. However I found that this tended to look less flowing and seemed to bulky so I decided against using this technique.

Testing out transitions and colour overlays/adjusting filters I have found does take time but is very beneficial in complying to my audiences preferences and perfecting the visuals  of my music video.

Link between lyrics and visuals

After my rough cut was shown for the first time to the audience I recieved a wide range of feedback on several different areas. This highlighted some of the flaws or confusion within my music video. One of the surveys that came back to me suggested that there was no real link between the lyrics and the visuals. This can be a problem for some people who feel there needs to be a direct link and to inlcude the narrative for the music video to 'make sense'. However my intention was never to create a music video that had a direct correlation, for I aimed to make a concept based music video and not a narrative based one. The lyrics for the song tell the tale of someone who has a great devotion and love for another person, I decided to interperet this in my own way by using friendship instead of the tradiotional love story. This I thought could be a fresh take on the idea of love and show an alternate way to express it within music.Although my music video does not follow a strong narrative (as this is not the intention) there is a background story of two young girls who share a devoted and strong friendship with each other.

 When I listened to the song for the first time I instantly thought of innocence, youth and happiness. This is why I aimed to represent a playful, happy and relaxed feel to my music video and characters. I also feel that by creating a concept based music video there is much more oppertuinity to create a stylised piece of work that focuses on imagery. Visuals and photography have always been a passion and interest of mine and I assume this is where my tendancy of focus stems from. I have always been drawn to more stylised music videos as I feel they look polished and slightly more professional. However this is my personal opinon and not neccessarily that of my target audience, fortunatley I found that within the more detailed feedback this was generally well received. I hope that the my link between lyrics and visuals is not immediatley clear to some will not hinder the appeal for my target audience.