Making music videos sing

Post, Nov, 2003 by Matthew Armstrong

Even when the telecine transfer is done up front though, the footage is again heavily processed with secondary and tertiary color correction and effects in the finishing system. "It's rare that we'll run an image by itself clean," relates O'Neil. "Sometimes it's an obvious effect; sometimes it's very subtle where we desaturate and blur it to add a little texture to the low lights. Thanks to the Sparks we use--the Sapphire plug-ins--we play around with the parameters. It's a little unpredictable but when it works we come up with a look that no one else has."

THE EDIT

While there is a general structure laid out in the director's treatment, in large part the editor develops the structure, balancing the performance footage with any B-roll or story footage. "When there is performance footage and a story the trick is making them both work, so the performance doesn't throw you out of the story and the story doesn't distract you from the performance," explains Lost Planet's Martinez.

Martinez, who is based in Santa Monica, first screens all the footage and marks the best performance clips. "Then I stack all the performances on top of each other [in the NLE] all synced so I can go back and forth between them easily," he explains. "Then on the lyric sheet I'll write the timecode for every line so I can use a performance from the second chorus in the first and shift things around depending on the performance. I do a performance-only edit and then go back and integrate the story. A lot of times when you try to integrate the story you find you're wiping out a great performance and you have to shift things around. Even when there is a story, I'm asked to cut a performance-only version so the label and the artists can see it compared with the cut that integrates the performance and the B-roll. Sometimes performance-only cuts work best."

Other than being somewhat limited by maintaining sync between the performance and music, the possibilities are endless when editing videos, a prospect that makes commercial editor Martinez want to continue editing videos, even if the jobs are not as lucrative as commercials.

"You have a lot more creative freedom cutting a music video," he says. "You can cut in a linear way or make it completely abstract. You're not locked into dialogue, voiceover, anything, so it's fun trying to give the viewers something that adds to the song, especially when it's a good song."

EFFECTIVELY BEAUTIFUL

Of course, the record labels' main purpose is to sell the music and create an image for the band. The desired image of today is one of beauty and riches, and great efforts are taken to project this. So while the effects in some videos rival the effects of films and commercials, the majority of the effects work is aimed at making beautiful people more beautiful.

"Even with a straight online, no effects, you're guaranteed a lot of clean-up beauty work," reports Kroma's Yukich, who uses the Avid|DS. "Removing sweat, freckles, wrinkles on the men and the women. No one has wrinkles now."