Editing

For the editing process we used the program Adobe Premier CS5, as it is more advanced than the software available to us at our 6th form and allowed for us to create a much greater variety of effects with relative ease. The main advantage of the program we used was the ability to layer clips ontop of one another, as well as having the songs audio running along seperately to the clips, which allowed for us to cut between clips easily, precisely, and without knocking previous clips out of sync with the audio. Below is a screenshot of the software, during the editing of the project.

We fitted the editing as best we could with the feel of the song and it's intensity at different points; for example using slower editing with longer cuts during the verses, which often include dolly shots or panning shots to mirror the calmer feel of the song. Where as in the chrouses and the solo we increased the speed of editing greatly to mirror the higher speed and frantic sound of the song. This caused us to almost run out of useable clips as we cut between the various shots at times very quickly during the songs climax, with some shots being on screen less than a second. Luckily, however, we had planned for this eventuality and used extra shots taken on the days we filmed as a back up incase we should run out of footage and placed some of those in the video, which fit nicely into the gaps we had.

We also tried to fit our editing with the music videos we had research in the planning stage of our production, and therefore most of our cuts are just straight cuts, with no fade or blurring, as this seems to be the norm in music videos, and also helped us to fit shots with the songs rhythm. However during the verse fades were sometimes used to add effect, in the following example it served to portray the link between the two narrative characters, which we see as weak at best.

Fade effect, combined with panning motion to show the link between the narrative characters.

We also used another program; Adobe After Effects CS5 which allowed for us to use parts of two seperate clips alongside each other, which is how we created the shots of the narrative characters walking in different locations, with a black background surrounding the clip segments. Another effect it allowed us to create was the shot of the male protagonist fading away on the bench, we did this by layering two shots over each other; one with the protagonist and one with out, then gradually fading from the shot with the protagonist to the shot without; thus making him gradually fade away.

Male protagonist fades away, showing his isolated and rejected state of mind.

Below is a screenshot of the After Effects software, showing how we used masks to create the fade that appears in the music video.