The Meat and Beat, PLANNING

The meat

We decided to use Fletcher in our video as the main character.
The ‘meat’ of most pop songs is a close up of the singers face, as it allows the audience to put a face or an image to the voice behind the song, which is very important as the voice is seen as the most important part of any song, even more so within the pop / electro genre that Owl City falls into.

But as neither Fletcher, me nor James have anything to do with Owl City it is not fair or conducive to represent them, so the best ways to keep ‘The meat’ are to……

· Keep central focus on the main character
· Try to frame the main character properly at all times
· Use Close up shots to enhance the focus on the main character
· Use Camera movement to follow the photos and keep the character in focus

The beat

A crucial part of representing the music and keeping the flow of the video is the idea of cutting the music to the beat or the key rhythm. Hot air balloon has quite a slow tempo in some parts but in others it actually more than doubles in tempo so we will have to cut the images at an appropriate speed. When you upload photos onto Sony Vegas (the editing software we are using) each photo is given a specific time length, so depending on the amount of images we have for that particular shot and what the tempo is like at that point in the song, we will have to shorten the time length by different amounts.
All genres use the same technique when it comes to editing, which is to cut the visuals at a change in tempo or structure, for example in the Foo Fighters video ‘The Pretender’ the visual shots change when the tempo dramatically decreases then increases again, emphasizing the music.