Advice Wanted For Music Videos!

[WillTrestarian]

Hey all, 

 

A friend of mine has asked me to help her make some cool and interesting music videos for her songs and I just wanted to know what people thought of them and if they had any suggestions for how we could improve?

 

Here's one we uploaded the other day, what do you think?

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WBczkm5bZ0

[WillTrestarian]

You're right I think making it all black and white did just make it a bit poncey and I definitely should have mixed the right instruments to the recording better, haha. Thanks for the feedback, I really appreciate it.

[john]

One or two observations:

 

She is the star, yet video time wise she is very much not in the forefront.  The balance is wrong for no good reason.

 

Shot timing. Watch any pro music video, the changes in shot are timed to the music. It multiplies the effectiveness of the edit a thousandfold.

 

You have some nice incidental shots but too few performance shots. In particular those performance shots should be at key points.

 

To help balance it, I would have shot the main parts of the video in two key sequences, two different outfits, two different locations OR something more inspired by the lyrics, and used the studio shots, live and incidental as the filler shots. You know something simple, the singer wandering around "in character", thoughtfully walking around looking at scenes, some just thoughtful, others with her singing almost as a narration, other again with her with the guitarist in a few locations performing the song... some to camera, most not to camera.

 

I agree with the comments on the black and white. There should be an artistic reason for the black and white. For example in the scenatios I describe above, black and white could have been chosen for the studio shots, lo fi home cinema for one of the incidental scenes to give it that home-shot feel, maybe obviously hand-held to underline that. You get the idea. The medium and the format is used to help distiguish between the scenes much like a change of clothes. Yet again, perhaps you can look to the lyrics to guide what scene would go where. Just now it appears more as a disconnected sequence of images with no real pull through the song.

 

Think of the video much like a movie or a song, with a beginning a middle and an end, with a plot to help pull it together. The plot could (and often is) related to the lyrics in some way, or it could be related to the emotion in some way. In music videos where that is not the case song performance is 95% of the video (or thereabouts).

 

Use the edits to emphasize the beat, the rhythm, the lines, the musical sections and sectional changes, the emotional feel and the energy, even when you are doing videos with strong representations of off stage relaxation and fun. Timing IS king.

 

Everything has a good reason. If you don't have a good reason, then don't do it

 

I hope this helps.

[WillTrestarian]

Thanks for the feedback, I'm taking it all on board!