Making Music Videos

[john]

Hey Gang

 

When it comes to making videos for their music, what do you do? Do you make your own? Use animation software? Turn photos to slides? Create a live action video? Create a lyric video?

 

Can you post a link to  one of your videos?

 

Cheers

 

John

[GregB]

Hi.  Here's "Dilmun", one of my earliest videos (2015), for a track from my first home-produced collaboration album "Prescient".  It is mainly stills, peppered with video.  Good quality high-res imagery was relatively generally scarce back then, let alone being able to find material which really suited the subject matter.

 

We agreed to pull this and eight other videos from our named album Channel and the album website because of some frightening court cases against amateurs who used copyrighted material.   Back then, many things were labelled as copyright-free but without proof!  I later re-instated the videos as UNLISTED so they can't be found publicly by browsing YouTube or Googling.  I'm sharing this here in a private-interest club.

 

Edited with Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2014, it had a few quirks:

• a visual prologue, for context, with music absent from the album track.  It was meant to imply slowly awakening from drowsy sleep as the plane descends somewhere in the Middle East.  Bahrain (the 'island of two seas') is where my album collaborator Martin Hale worked post-school, and it was his song.
• The colourful real images were contrasted by the black and white film of Wilson and Keppel, a famous music hall act, doing their 'Sand Dance' in the early 1930s.  It could be viewed as racist but I felt it was social commentary and an accurate depiction of Western attitudes of 'others' during that era and for decades afterward.  I too was brainwashed by children's comics that depicted other cultures as 'lesser'.  (Fortunately humanity moves on, albeit slowly and with many stumbles.)  This approach was contrasted by the gleaming cities towards the end.
• The Sand Dance segments required significant cutting/tweaking to finally work rhythmically with the music ... not perfectly, but within the ball park.
• Also the first time I moved away from gentle crossfades to jump cuts, sections with fast-paced image changes matching the beat.  It is surprising that with 24 frames per second, images sometimes cannot be made to perfectly match the beat ... a half-frame difference can be notice by the eye/ear. In most cases, the best solution was to have the image appear slightly ahead of the beat.

 

Cheers,

Greg

Edited May 21, 2022 by GregB
spelling

[Tonedead]

I took a swing at it just to get something on youtube. Hastily made,poorly planned slideshow that generated less interest than my soundcloud page so I was definitely doing something wrong 

[Janice]

On 5/21/2022 at 11:57 AM, john said:

Hey Gang

 

When it comes to making videos for their music, what do you do? Do you make your own? Use animation software? Turn photos to slides? Create a live action video? Create a lyric video?

 

Can you post a link to  one of your videos?

 

Cheers

 

John

I pay freelancers on divert to create lyrics videos. Here's the link.

 

[edurbrow]

On 5/21/2022 at 7:57 PM, john said:

Hey Gang

 

When it comes to making videos for their music, what do you do? Do you make your own? Use animation software? Turn photos to slides? Create a live action video? Create a lyric video?

 

Can you post a link to  one of your videos?

 

Cheers

 

John

We live in a YouTube world. Though I hope people listen to the music, I've discovered merging visuals and music to be an artform in itself.

 

[john]

4 hours ago, edurbrow said:

We live in a YouTube world. Though I hope people listen to the music, I've discovered merging visuals and music to be an artform in itself.

 

Absolutely. When it comes to editing, it is very similar to using a DAW.

[john]

4 hours ago, edurbrow said:

We live in a YouTube world. Though I hope people listen to the music, I've discovered merging visuals and music to be an artform in itself.

 

oh and good job on the vid. Looked like you had fun making it.

[Disconnectica]

Been making my own videos, and writing my own software to do effects in them.  Ends up taking a lot of time, but at least they don't look like every other video.  Most home-made videos these days seem to be montages of free stock footage thrown together.

 

This one uses a mind-bending effect called slit scan or time displacement.

 

After that I decided I should put myself in my videos more, and made this one using a Droste effect.

 

I also made a couple for my piano solos.  This one also uses the Droste effect.

 

And lastly this one, not using software I wrote, but rather Photo Mirage, which animates still images, in this case photos I took in Iceland.  There was no video taken for this at all, it's just still photos that have been animated.

 

[Danger Man]

I just stand in front of a cam and play and sing. Keeping it simple so the attention is on the song / arrangement.