Production Blog - Raw Footage to Masterpiece

Greetings! The official countdown to the final music video of “Young Dumb & Broke” has set in. We are currently standing at 6 days till it is released (The music video will be released on November 8th, 5pm EST). I hope everyone is as excited as Janiah and I. In preparation, we are making our final edits. Keep reading to get some behind-the-scenes pointers on what we have done.

 

Going over final tweaks with Janiah.

Cutting Down

• Before getting to the interesting part of editing, there needs to be a solid foundation for a video. Over a couple of days, I have been working alongside Janiah to cut down our music video. If you recall, when I previously spoke about editing I had mentioned we had not finished the cinéma vérité part of filming. Well in. In my last blog, I spoke about filming these scenes which wrapped up editing so I could start the in-depth editing. Initially when I added all these clips the video extended to around 20 minutes but I quickly edited out the fluff. Despite making progress by cutting out 12 minutes of clips, an 8-minute video was far from the end product. At this point I took a closer look at the video, analyzing each clip and its purpose. If it had none I moved it to the end of the video. This way I could watch the new music video and determine if this clip was needed—in most cases, it wasn’t, so I cut out all of the clips at the end. Then, I watched the video again and edited out the beginning and end of the clips where the characters weren’t explicitly shown. Surprisingly, after doing both of these steps the video had made its way down to 2 minutes and 30 seconds. The following day I met with Janiah in a cafe to edit collectively. As Janiah is the main character it is important that Janiah could see all the clips and make sure she is comfortable posing them on the internet. We sifted through the video and we removed a few clips but the overall time did not significantly change. After this, I handed the iPad (my editing device) to Janiah. She removed a couple of clips, snipped a lot of segments, and sped up one clip when she was “taking a picture” of the DRV pink stadium because it was very slow. We had gotten the video down to 2 minutes at this point. At this time we had to split up but we discussed what clips could be taken out or snipped to be shorter. When I went back to editing later that day I removed these pre-discussed segments of the video. Finally, the video was cut to a reasonable time at 1 minute and 18 seconds. This is where I paused editing since the transition from library to having fun hadn’t taken space and I wasn’t sure how many seconds I would need to complete it. Once I edited this segment (this will be further discussed in editing effects) I adjusted the “phone clip” accordingly to fit the time requirement. 

Sound

• As for editing it was clear that Janiah took lead in this department. We added in the audio which helped determine where our main transition would take place (this will be further discussed in the editing effects section). Once the audio was added there were a few tweaks we needed to make in order to align the audio and some actions together. We did this by shortening the phone clip as mentioned. In the end seating the video at 1:10 which is part of the ideal range for the music video. The sound editing was the easiest part to edge it given the basis we had from the storyboard (despite the changes made from the original storyboard). 

Editing Effects 

• Editing can be split into two main parts: color design and fade in/out. Starting with the color design. Janiah and I noticed how the whole video was taken with the same lighting and it was very clear which would be good in most cases but for us it was important to use color and lighting design in order to portray emotions. We wanted the first segment to be gloomy and the rest of the video to be vibrant. Originally we thought it would be easier to apply a “summer” filter to the end part to give this effect. Quickly, we established it is better to apply a glum filter to the beginning since the first scenes are very well-lit giving a cheerful appearance. Janiah and I played with a couple features on CapCut before deciding to use the “Humble” filter to give this desired effect. Moving on to the fade in/out. CapCut has a feature to do these effects but I wasn’t aware when editing. This is why I started following a few tutorials before coming across one specifically for CapCut where the feature was shown. Once I was aware I added into the effects which ended up being a very smooth process. Overall the time of the video didn’t change so it still stands at 1:10 for timing. 

  
  

  

As you can tell Janiah and I are very close to the final music video. Stay tuned to see our adaptation of “Young Dumb and Broke”.