Critique of "Whistle"

"Whistle"... what worked, and what didn't:

After finishing my music video, I have to look back and decide what worked and what didn't work about my video.

I ended up making a different video that I thought I would. My original goal was to show a moment in time. I envisioned it being told through using a studio with a black canvas, with a man setting up trees and props that would turn into life-size trees through special effects (using a lot of fading and rack focusing). After reviewing the footage I had from my outdoor location, and having used the studio for another project, I decided to cut out the portions of the video that had the studio. (For a review of my artistic intent, click here.)

Review of effects:

The rack focusing worked; it really helped set the scene, and get across the idea of the revelation of the moment in the mind of the viewer.

The ambient sounds worked. I had to fill the left channel on all of the shots of the town run, and adjust the levels so that the sounds were consistent, and so that they didn't overwhelm the music.

The camera movement worked because it fit into the feel of the video. The video has significant movement; but this is okay because it keeps interest in a scene that would otherwise get boring. I intentionally used a small steady-cam rig instead of a tripod, because I knew that there needed to be movement to keep interest and to enable natural looking transitions.

The music itself worked. I was very happy with how the music turned out because I produced it myself, and I'm often very critical of my work; however, I think that the music fit the scene well. One effect that I was pleased with was how the music seems to express open space; this was achieved by cleaning up the EQ of the song and adding a reverb (which I did with Garage Band).

Overall, the lighting was good. Believe it or not, I didn't adjust the lighting of the shots by the town run. For me, this helped reinforce the point that good set-up can save you a lot of work. The only place where I adjusted lighting was on the first and last clips; I wanted a little more highlighting on the water as the ripples played across the screen.

The editing was good, meaning that the cuts made sense; I successfully edited on an aspect-to-aspect revelation of the scene. I was unsure that this would work, but I was very pleased with the result. One thing I might have done differently would be to experiment with artificial blurring; I tried to capture all focusing effects with the camera itself, but it would have been interesting to see what artificial focusing is like.

Another aspect of editing that I like is that there was a clear beginning, middle, and end. With a non-narrative format to the music and editing, I feel that there needed to be a clear structure to the video. Maybe in future projects I'll attempt to make a non-narrative video without the three part structure; but for this project, I think the structure worked.

The colors worked; most of the footage was good to begin with, but I edited the beginning and end shots to change the tint to a warmer color. This was done to highlight the water, and also to differentiate the beginning and end from the middle.