BAND PRIMER-MAY 2010

VIDEO SHOOTS-PT.1

-Hi everyone! Since my band CAROLINE BLUE is in the process of shooting music videos for songs off of our “Not For The Innocent” CD, I thought I’d share a few things in regards to this.

-Back in the days when MTV actually played music videos 24/7, it seemed like a dream for a band to have a music video made. Costs for a 3 minute video could easily rise to $15-30,000 or more & you needed an actual filming company and/or studio to make it. Today, prices have come down drastically & it can all be filmed by home camcorders & edited on your computer. What’s popular as of late are small camcorders w/ some editing capability. For less than $200 you could film a band live, tweak it a little and have it up on your site and/or You Tube by the end of the day. Not bad! Course, if you’re going for a more polished video there’s more involved…

-One of the main reason why costs have come down is the digital format. Each digital media has a time line on it. This applies to both video & audio. With this being in place, it’s a lot easier for someone to edit parts around. The base line is the same so, depending on the program used, you can just move stuff around via the time lines. This is a simplified explanation of the process. If you were to do this via analog format, the process takes much longer because there’s no time line to use as a basis. Remember the stories of engineers having to cut analog tape w/ razor blades back in the day? Digital makes editing so much easier in that sense.

-There are 2 basic ways to film a music video-you can either perform the music live or you can lip sync to a pre-recorded track. There are advantages/disadvantages to both. If you shoot while performing live, it’s best to have at least 3 camcorders running at the same time-unless you have someone who’s really good with editing and/or filming. The reason why is no matter how many times you play the song live, there will always be some change involved. Maybe the song’s tempo was slower on the 3rd take or the bassist made a mistake here, or the drummer played something different here, etc. This makes editing harder because if things aren’t in sync, then the person editing has to make it so-which takes more time-which costs more money (mistakes are obviously edited out). With lip syncing, that problem is eliminated because the music will be the same each time. In addition, if performing live & you have multiple camcorders running, you won’t have to film as many takes. One of the most important things when filming is the angle of the shot. A great angle can make or break a shot. If you have multiple camcorders, each one can focus on an individual band member. Let’s say the band performs their song & it’s hot. Even if no other take comes close, you at least have 3 different angles with the same audio track-and it’s amazing how having different angles can create the illusion of movement in a video. You could make a pretty decent video just with that.

-More video shoot info next month!

FOURTH COAST ENTERTAINMENT MAGAZINE WEBSITE
FOURTH COAST ENTERTAINMENT MAGAZINE ON FACEBOOK