Evil News Rides Post

I used a generous portion of hyperbole in titling this bit of the series, but not wholly without warrant. You, the director, should do the assembly edit of your music video at the very least. You have all your footage shot and it looks great, but you have inevitably made mistakes. There’s no better way to confront these than by watching all of your footage. Once you confront them you can learn from them and hopefully not make them next time.

Here’s the process:

Remember that second-by-second outline you originally wrote up? That’s basically your music video already edited! Pull that back out and start lining your clips up. The slating you did will come in handy here. I edit in the same FCP sequence I used to make my timecode. I know that when the timecode on the slate matches the timecode of the sequence that my clip is lined up and that the lip sync will be dead on. I didn’t employ a slate on my first video, and I had to spend hours moving clips around trying to get them sunk (synced?). Even with all that work, the sync is soft at several points in the video. I hate that.

So your first step is to simply assemble the footage in order. I really like to just blow through the whole song doing this. Then when I go to play it back finally, it’s like I have a music video! It’s not done, but this is the first look I get at something that approximates the video I had in mind from the beginning.

Once you have done this, I’d say you don’t lose anything by passing it off to an editor. I’ve mostly edited my own stuff, but I pine for the day when I can put that responsibility in the hands of someone who has the same zest for it that I have for directing.

So just to recap: you look at and assemble the footage first. Then begin to refine, whether its you or someone else.

The Post Process as I Have Come to Know It

Step 1: Editing
Refine your edit. Are there swears that you have to cut away from? Would it look cool if you flipped that shot back and forth when the singer says “in out, in out, yeah”? In this part of the process you shouldn’t do anything but the most basic of effects. Maybe a little fast motion. A flipped or scaled shot. Nothing drastic. I use text overlays to describe planned effects shots right on top of the video as placeholders.

You can also spend some time preparing visual elements of the effects. I like to bring a still frame into photoshop and mess with it just so I have a plan to work from.

Then, once your edit is where you want it, meet with the act. Sit down and explain that this is not their finished video. You’re still on step 1, you see. None of the effects are done. This is just footage. Watch it through a couple of times and then write down any changes they want. Be really thorough with them, and explain that you need them to be thorough. The further you proceed into post production, the harder it is to change things. Show them any prep you have done on visual effects and explain how they will work into the overall video. Make sure everything is sitting well with them as you proceed. If they want changes that will take more time than you have there, make a plan to meet again. I guess you’re probably catching on. Do not proceed to step 2 until everyone is on the same page.

Music video was my first exposure to the creator/client relationship, and it was very difficult for me the first time. I didn’t stop and let the artist respond to the video at various stages of the post-production process. I cut it together from start to finish, did tons of composites, added effects, the works. It was taking 12 hours to render out by the time I started showing them cuts, but they naturally had changes they needed me to make. Every time that happened, I would have to remove all my effects and go from scratch on that. I’d never been in a situation as a filmmaker where someone else had the position to tell me how I was going to change my work, and that fresh and unusual sensation coupled with the fact that I was spending every night with my computer screaming away at the other end of my bedroom on a re-re-re-render was no easy process for me to endure. Save yourself the trouble. Understand that they will want changes, and some of them will be ones you disagree with. That’s fine. This is a great moment in your career to learn to collaborate. My friend Andreas Duess, an incredibly creative advertising executive, explained to me that this is basically the condition of being any kind of artist. You will probably deal with it for the rest of your career.

Step 2: Compositing
Apply your effects. Music videos have gotten me using After Effects and Motion more than I ever thought I would. I like AE for some types of things and Motion for others. Maybe you made a music video that doesn’t have any digital effects, and for that I salute you. I’ve been feeling like green screen is sort of a crutch lately, but I end up scheduling a few green screen shots in almost every production I do, but I think real effects are awesome and I want to do more of them. This section will be up to you. If you are an effectsy type of director, you’ll already be on top of this, and if you aren’t it’s of not interest to you. And that’s all I have to say about that.

Remember to show your shit to your artist after this step also!

Step 3: Color Timing
I firmly believe that one of the main things separating an amateur-looking film or video from professional work is color timing. If you shot on film, you would want to do a supervised transfer to DI, and you would be all over making it pop. Video should be no different. This is something everyone needs to learn about digital, be it photography or video: if you don’t adjust the colors of your images, you are leaving a major aesthetic decision to whoever made your camera.

Fortunately, there are great tools lately made available to everyone for this. If you are using Final Cut Studio, you probably have access to Color, which is the big scary un-Mac-like program that came in the box. Color is an amazing program that everyone should be using. If you don’t have that, After Effects and Motion have some okay color correction tools.

I leave this to the last step because I like to flatten my video file and run the whole thing through Color all at once. That way I’m applying the color timing to the visual effects and the regular video alike, without discriminating between them. This unifies the look of your video from shot to shot, and can give the effects an added air of seamlessness.

The aesthetics of this are up to you. I’m a fan of bright colors and rich blacks. Maybe you like sepias or moody, muted colors. Maybe you’re making a music video parody of The Matrix and need tons of green in your skin tones. This is where you make that shine. This is the final step of your process. This is where you put the whipped cream and maraschino cherry on your sundae.

Bring the artist back one last time and show them the finished product. Make a little production out of it. Why not? Put it on your television and darken the room.

They might have tweaks that they want to make. It’s still their money, so it’s still up to them. Explain, though, that this is late in the process now, so making changes is difficult and costly.

A Few Notes on Fonts and Formats
A fun final touch is to put the little chyron in the lower left corner at the beginning and end of the video that says who the artist is and who, naturally, the director is. This is fine for the version of the video you are uploading to YouTube or whatever, but keep in mind that when BET shows music videos, they put the chyrons on themselves. As such, they’re not going to accept tapes with your chyron on them. You need to maintain a version of the video that does not include that.

I have never been involved in the process of distributing music videos to television or the internet, so I don’t have any advice for how to do that. Hopefully your band is on a label or has a manager who can take it around to the few TV channels that still play music videos. The only thing I can speak on is the format. Television is still working from beta tapes, in large part. Find a way to get your video onto some beta tapes and get those to the artist. That will make things easier. Make sure the betas don’t have chyrons!

Now You’re Done!

Now that you’re done, put your video on your iPod or some DVDs that you can carry around. In general, the only way people will consider you for making their music video is if you’ve already proven that you can make a good music video. I got my second gig by having my first video handy. I’ve also gotten non-music video work from it. Keep it handy and have business cards. There will be a pretty bad signal to noise ratio on this. I’ve shaken hands with dozens of people I’d like to make projects with, and only a few of them have come to me and asked me to direct something for them, but the more work I do the more people I meet, so the ratio doesn’t have to be great, just good. It’s your work that should be great.

End of transmission.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5