A few months back...actually it was in the fall if not perhaps even longer ago than that, Skot asked if I had interest in helping him get another music video made for Leper. I told him that I could probably help him on something, however it was a bit of a busy time so I wasn't sure how quick I could do anything. At any rate, he sent a clip in the fall that involved a deer skull. That footage was shot and edited by John Betten. John creates under the project name Innocent Robot. I watched it but had no idea as to what Skot had in mind. I also wasn't sure what song he wanted this music video to be used for. I asked him about it and learned that the song was to be "If I Should Die" of the "Red Words" album. Skot also would tell me at the time he had some more footage he'd like to utilize for this video and perhaps we could also capture some other additional footage. Skot asked me if I could figure a way to blur out the covered figure which was holding and moving the skull but I wasn't really sure how to do that. That discussion was during the holiday season so everything was more or less on the back burner for a time.
A few weeks ago, he sent me a couple self shot performance clips to utilize with that previous clip. All of the clips had different variants of "black and white" and the performance clips were shot vertically while the skull video was shot horizontally. When I asked Skot about the horizontal versus the vertical clips, he stated that it didn't matter to him so I tried to figure out what I could do with it.
On the first day of messing around with the clips, I worked on syncing everything up with the music file as best as I could. The deer skull footage was of shorter length than the music file. The vocal performance clips were separated into the two verses with Skot raising up at the beginning of one and laying back down at the end of both. The other performance clip of Skot playing his guitar and Rachel laying in the background was longer than everything else so I had to make that the main file on the project timeline. I utilized a second layer of that file for the purpose of editing, leaving the main file alone. I felt that I got the vocal performance clip synced fairly close at first but had some trouble with the guitar performance clip originally. I placed the deer skull footage to start with the track at this point.
I came up with an idea to move the horizontal clips to the edges of the screen utilizing the middle for the deer skull footage. The vocal performance clips were along the left side of the screen and the guitar performance clips were on the right. At this point I still wasn't really sure where to go with it but I sent Skot a screenshot to see if he was happy with the look of having the performance clips on the left and right of the screen. He seemed to be...he also stated that he liked the variances of the "black and white" in the different clips.
The next chance I had to work on the video I ended up putting an idea together. I utilized my headphones in hopes to get everything synced up as close as I could, focusing more on the guitar performance clip. Once that was accomplished, I went through making some cuts to the performance clips. I put together something that I thought might work but with the deer skull footage being about 30 seconds short, I wanted to find a way to fill the full screen. One method that I tried was slowing down the last 10 seconds of the clip by a third but I wasn't happy with how that looked compared to the rest of the footage.
I decided to shift the skull clip to the end of the song and added the titles to the first 30 seconds. This meant making a few adjustments with the performances clips as well to fit with the skull better. While I had originally used the clip of Skot playing the song on guitar on the right side of the screen and the clips of Skot singing on the left, I decided to alternate the location of the performance clips (from left or right) at various points, utilizing fades and hard cuts. I also adjusted the opacity of some of the performance clips to about 30%. All this was intended to keep as much of the "story" involving the deer skull intact.
After creating the titles and making the necessary adjustments, I rendered the project then added in the aged film effects as well as the vignette effect to blur the edges a bit to the entire project. I increased some aspects of the aged film effect, the lines, dust, and hairs. I did some adjustment on the jitter then decided to remove the adjustment I made as the title was very hard to read through the jitter. I also removed the effect affecting the color appearance to preserve the black and white of the clips as how I received them.
I sent the project to Skot to see how he felt about what I had done so far. He was generally pleased but wanted a few adjustments. We also found that the vocal performance clip was slightly out of sync with the music file. I quickly made that adjustment. The other part Skot wanted more of was the raising up and laying down from his vocal performance clip. I told him that I was pretty certain that I had utilized all of those parts, I would look into it more. Skot also hoped to get some clips involving Colleen who had performed some additional and backing vocals (and perhaps other instrumentation). We made a plan to sit down together to better collaborate and hopefully finish up the project.
When we were able to sit down together to collaborate on some more changes, we took out a few of the guitar performance parts. We also made a screenshot of a close up of the skull to use with the titling at the beginning. By chance the bloom effect I utilized in the titling ended up affecting some of the footage and that "accident" was such that Skot liked it and we kept it and utilized it elsewhere as well. We ended up slowing down the rising clip of the skull at the beginning which then changed a bit of the flow of the project. We also re-arranged some of John's footage to fit Skot's idea better and did a few changes to the performance clips, adding Skot laying down at the end as well.
Once satisfied with the direction of the project, we then began adding effects such as the old film and vignette. We ended up adding one other effect called Cold CCD to give a slight bluish tint. A few adjustments were made to the effects and the project was finished!
When we were able to sit down together to collaborate on some more changes, we took out a few of the guitar performance parts. We also made a screenshot of a close up of the skull to use with the titling at the beginning. By chance the bloom effect I utilized in the titling ended up affecting some of the footage and that "accident" was such that Skot liked it and we kept it and utilized it elsewhere as well. We ended up slowing down the rising clip of the skull at the beginning which then changed a bit of the flow of the project. We also re-arranged some of John's footage to fit Skot's idea better and did a few changes to the performance clips, adding Skot laying down at the end as well.
Once satisfied with the direction of the project, we then began adding effects such as the old film and vignette. We ended up adding one other effect called Cold CCD to give a slight bluish tint. A few adjustments were made to the effects and the project was finished!
Footage captured by John Betten and Skot Shaw. Editing by Joel A. Swanson using Final Cut Pro X on a Mac Mini. Project directed by Skot Shaw.
TigerRAWk Music Video Playlist
