Editing for Music Video

   For editing the music video we used Pinnacle Studios like last time. After we dumped the raw footage to the computer we started to synchronize the video with the audio, 'Thrift Shop' by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis. We wanted to tell the story we imaged in pre-production. To emulate the original Thrift shop video, we made sure to have the right costumes and setting to fit the theme of the video. We took the rough footage and transferred it into the editing software. It took a while to load and process, we thought the program had crashed initially, but eventually, it prevailed. On this shoot we filmed with 1080p quality on my own camcorder instead of the schools since the battery on the school's camera was wonky. Our first scene was the one with Joe, the owner of the Little Thrift Store, pushing my partner Preace on a shopping cart across the establishment; this acted as the establishing shot. We followed up with a cut to the Goodwill where we started the fist verse of the song. I found that syncing up the external audio with the movement of our mouths took a lot of work and attention. I constantly found myself tinkering and slightly adjusting the audio to match the sound in the film. One of the shots that we thought we needed to edit a lot was a transitional shot from me to my partner to display different parts of the lyrics. Instead, on filming day we just decided to use a flash pan as the transition from me to my partner. We then added all the other remaining parts of the video and concluded by adding a fade out and title card at the beginning. We thought about adding extra filters and lenses on the footage but ended up not doing so as we thought it would cheapen the video. the video ended up being a little over a minute and ten seconds. We followed all conventional music video stereotypes and felt that our video conveyed the same feeling as other multi-million dollar music videos. 

Filming of Music Video

   We had already established where we were filming (a local thrift store and a Goodwill) prior and started the day by going to my partner Preace's house. We enlisted his brother to help do some shots that the two us alone couldn't do, like the tracking shot in a part of the video. Our gear consisted of the school's camcorder, a tripod, my own personal camcorder, and two SD cards (one personal and one from the school). Since my friend lives in Miramar, we decided to find a local thrift there and ended up stumbling across The Little Thrift Store. The owner, Joe seemed cool a ecstatic that we were filming a music video, let alone it being the song Thrift Shop, which popularized the notion of thrift stores to kids my age. Joe also helped us in one shot with a shopping cart shown below: 

   A lot of ideas were floating around to how the cinematography would work in this project. Some shot ideas were scrapped and others were improved upon. During a shot at the Little Thrift Store, we planned to shift the camera while it was on me to Preace which ended up looking choppy. Instead, we used a flash pan to create a smooth transition from character A to character B; it ended up pretty nice. I almost forgot to mention that without Preace's brothers help filming that sequence and the project in general, it wouldn't have turned out as well as it did. The next location we filmed at was a Goodwill. The look of a Goodwill is different from the aesthetic of a local, small thrift shop. Racks of clothing lined the store and is useful as the shots that required us to rummage through and examine the clothing required a lot of space and clothes. Not to mention that that particular Goodwill had a giant clock that we could play our pun to. Before I forget, costumes played an important part in our project since we wanted our video to embody the flashy and individualistic nature of thrift store fashion. The chains, the pink hat and robe all echo the confidence attitude shown in the original music video. Overall, our filming was great. It only took us a day to film and in that day we had accomplished a lot and learned a lot about camera and angle composition, whether one scene could gel well with the other and how to tell a story with film.

Us at the Goodwill

"Dressed in pink..."