Free Footage Music Video

We have been tasked to create a music video using only royalty free footage found online.The backing song can be any song that we want. At first, I browsed the royalty free websites with a song in mind that I wanted to make a music video for. After browsing the royalty-free footage website, found here https://archive.org/details/movies , I realized that the footage was very different to what I thought it would contain. A lot of the royalty free footage was very old, and did not link well with me song of choice, and so after more browsing, I decided to find various clips of the same genre, and then choose the backing song. The clips I started to collect were anime clips, of which for some reason there were lots of. I found a song from my playlist that resembled to style of the anime clips I collected and started editing. Because some of the clips were very different to one another, I decided that I would choose a 'main' clip, to have as the backing footage, so whenever I didn't have a good clip, the backing footage would usually provide a good filler.

To start with, I studied the song closely, whilst watching some of the clips I had found, just to see what I was working with, and so make sure I had enough content, and the correct type of content. After this, I started to shorten the clips I had, as well as clipping smaller parts of them. I clipped parts of the anime's where I could link it the song is some way, such as a beat drop or specific part of the song, as well as anything that I could use to edit with, such as a sudden movement, or an action. I also clipped dancing from the clips, because that can always be used as filler. From this stage, I slowly worked through the song, moving the clips around so that they linked to the song, and then for parts where I didn't have any content, I watched over the initial clips again, and found some more media, or I edited different clips together to match the song.

Examples of specific things I did in the music video to match parts of the song, were things such as jumping to the rhythm, or camera movements, allowing me to switch between clips, making it look professional, and like the clips are actually linked. The song I chose was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0syDuy14ZEI&ab_channel=WaifuWednesdays ,of which contains lots of rhythm switches, such as slow parts of the song, and also lots of increases in tempo, and faster beats. This made editing fun and interesting, due to the wide range of actions and sounds I could edit to, it also made editing a little easier, because there is a strong indication of when I need to change clip or make an edit.

A time stamp of an example for editing to the song is at at 2 minutes 12 seconds. At this part of the song, the lyrics are "3,2,1, fight!", followed by a faster paced beat. In my music video, at this stage, as soon as the lyric says 'fight', I changed the clip to a fight scene that matches the tempo of the song. Another example is at 17 seconds, where I tried to find a clip that made it look like the character is singing the lyrics to the song, of which I think turned out pretty good. At 30 seconds I again tried to link the song's tempo changing with a clip. At 45 seconds into the song, I think the clip I used was good and matched the tempo, although I could have improved it on second look, as there are obvious beats that I could have linked to the clip, where different characters are shown. I could have introduced a new character on each beat drop. At 1 minute, the song becomes faster paced, and so I matched this change in tempo with fight scenes and jumping, and when it calms down after this at 1:15, I slowed down the mood with nature, and happy clips.

Overall, the activity was very fun and I learnt a lot about editing from it. I was surprisingly pleased with the outcome, despite some blurry scenes from having to change the scale of some of the clips due to the footage all being different sizes. I know how to improve future music videos and other time-based editing I will do in the future.