Don't Tell Them - Bonfire (Draft One)

-The First Edit-

Well, first of all, I'd like to say this has been one heck of a stressful process. Over the past couple of weeks we have produced a first draft of our music video. Wow. I would be lying if I said I wasn't surprised we actually made it to this point without changing our song. However, we did and I am currently very proud with how this edit has come out. To discuss, let's head back to the beginning.

When filming, we decided to stick as closely as possible to the initial storyboarding that we produced as a group. This allowed for a large amount of the clips to be captured easily as we had already planned what we needed. This helped massively during the editing as we knew exactly what we had collected and what we could use where. What we did find however, was that we had a lot more footage than we required, with a lot of it not being able to be used. This proved to us that it was a great idea to film massive amounts of footage so we wouldn't run out. 

We started the edit by working out the choruses and filling them with the band sequences we had filmed. We then moved onto the bonfire scene, as this is our favourite part. We then worked on building up the narrative components, from the beginning through to when Jack gets beaten up. Finally, we capped out the ending - which will be discussed in a moment. There was a bit of drama, as always, in that we couldn't convert the clips from the camera onto the MAC, which is the editing rig that we wanted to use. However, once we sorted this out - editing became a lot easier to do individually and as a group due to the larger screen and multitude of different features and techniques on the newer versions of Premiere Pro. 

After completing the edit, and showing it off to both classmates and our teachers, we received feedback that (thankfully) we agreed completely with - in that the ending didn't quite have the impact that we were searching for. It was as though there was this big buildup that just ended up falling off. As a result, we have decided to get some more footage to create an ending that packs more of an emotional punch (trust me, just you wait and see!). We also received the feedback that we may need some more lip syncing, which we can capture very easily; especially when bearing in mind we still have an orange smoke grenade. Our own personal improvements are to try and capture some more footage so it doesn't have to be reused and to do some colour correction to the edit that makes it look that little more eye popping. Here's to draft 2........