Our Final Cut

After adding in our final footage we thought it would be very easy to fill in the final few seconds of our music video. However, it was actually more challenging than we had first anticipated as we had so much footage to condense into a short period of time. Furthermore, we wanted to add some more cinematic shots into our montage of James 'recovering' to make it more impactful to fit with the increasing pace of the music; this turned out to be a bigger job than we had intended as the montage was already edited with the correct timings and continuity story-wise we needed to decide which shots we needed to replace and what story we wanted to tell. Therefore we decided to use our free periods as extra editing time to ensure we got this done to a standard we were happy with.

A happy accident during the editing of our final bits of footage occurred when we were editing James donating to the homeless person, creating the cyclical nature we intended in our video. Once we had selected the angles we wanted to use from our footage and managed to condense the moment in the few seconds we had we decided to play it back to see if it ran smoothly. It just so happened that we had forgotten to turn the sound off on one of the clips where money is dropped into the cup, creating a moment of diegetic sound with the coins. We actually all really liked this, even though we hadn't intended to use any diegetic sounds in the video. We thought it brought the issue to life at the end of the video, distancing it from the song and the story and bringing it more directly to the audience, reflecting how the band were influenced by this real life issue in the writing of the song. 

We deliberated for a long time over the colouring of the video. We tried putting all the clips in black and white and compared it to the gradual introduction of colour and, in the end, we decided to stick with the initial colouring we had intended. When we showed our rough cut to audiences they were very complimentary over the colour change and, upon questioning, said it helped them to understand the narrative and clearly connoted a change of tone in the video. Ultimately we agreed with our audience and really liked the way the gradual introduction of colour lifted the video from it's gloomy, black and white beginnings to reflect the hope and uplifting atmosphere we created at the end. Therefore we went through the video and edited the clips one at a time to ensure the introduction was subtle and smooth so as not to jolt the video and we are all very happy with the final product. We felt the addition of the colour added something different making it stand out from every other indie rock music video whilst still containing enough semantic and syntactic elements to make it easily identifiable in this genre. 

We also decided to change the font at the beginning and end of the video. Upon re-watching it we thought the previous font was too blocky and harsh on top of the video therefore we decided to find a thinner, more elegant font to make the video look more professional and mature. 

Overall we are really happy with the completed video and think we've managed to achieve our intention with the presentation of homelessness and hope for those living on the streets. We are now going to show the final video to audiences and ensure the message is clear and the video enjoyable.