Producing a music video

So when I was first tasked with producing and making my own music video to a pre-existing song, my initial thought was to look for inspiration in order to collect ideas. I searched through different music genres, artists and songs until I remembered a Nike advert I once watched which I particularly enjoyed. The song in the advert was Ice Cube's "Today was a good day" and the video consisted of my favorite skateboarder cursing through the streets of Los Angeles, meeting up with friends and landing some very difficult tricks. I decided that I could use some of the same ideas in my video considering that is basically my day to day life anyway, so I set about creating a story board and planning with friends how we would shoot each angle and skateboard trick.

So the filming day came and we started skating, we had multiple cameras filming at all times through the evening, collecting different shots of skating and just general B-roll of all of us. We used a gimbal to steady some of the establishing shots and add a professional finish to the video. It was important to film more than just skateboarding because the video is all about having a great day so we included clips of us laughing and just messing about. looking back, I realize that we literally just did what we do most days after school but filmed a lot more this time and I think that this adds to the verisimilitude of the production.

The editing of the video was crucial in order to achieve a high standard of finish, for example syncing the song with the skateboarding is vital for the video to flow correctly as I noticed with the Nike advert I was inspired by. I discovered the best way to do this was to line up the audio spikes from the videos with the spikes from the beat of the song. Other than that the editing was fairly simple because not much post production is needed. Looking back if I could change anything about the filming process, it would be that I wish we had filmed during the day because all the shots are at night which doesn't quite fit with theme of the song. If the filming had taken place during day light the overall feel of the video would be slightly more uplifting and many of the shots would be clearer.