IT IS WHAT IT IS
During the spring semester of my junior year of school, I took a class that focused on video editing and motion design. My final assignment for the video editing portion of this class was to create a music video, using a real song of my choosing. The video had to be at least a minute and a half in length and include original footage. I chose to use the song It Is What It Is by Jenna Raine. Scroll to the bottom of this page to watch my video!
I wanted to make a video in which I was fully “acting out “ the lyrics. I also wanted a song that I’d be able to fully shoot in my apartment. I chose “It Is What It Is” because the lyrics describe activities that were replicatable in my apartment, and because of the fun and upbeat message of the song.
The first step was to create a concept slide. This allowed me to put my idea into words, and find imagery as inspiration for the scenes I wanted to shoot. The purpose of this activity was simply to start brainstorming ideas, so it was created in Google Slides.
I next decided to make a lyric slide in order to further study the song. I went line by line, thinking about what I could do to represent each lyric. Some parts were easy. “Shrunk all my clothes in the washing machine” would be me sitting on top of the washing machine in my apartment. Other lyrics took longer for me to come up with something.
The next step was creating a storyboard, which detailed the shots I would need to capture in each scene. I took each line that I had brainstormed from my lyric slide and turned it into a “shot” on my storyboard. Storyboard templates were provided by my instructor.
I was confident in my video editing abilities, so I decided to focus my project on getting lots of creative shots. My favorite scene was this one, which started with me holding a cupcake with a lit candle. My roommate is standing in front of me, holding the camera.
After blowing out the candle, I handed the cupcake to my roommate. In this frame, my right hand is putting the cupcake into my roommate’s left hand, below the camera. My left hand is grabbing my phone out of her right hand.
Immediately after grabbing the phone, I spun in two circles, keeping the camera pointed at my face. This required my roommate to duck to get out of the way! Clearly, this didn’t always work, as you can see her in the corner of this frame.
Once I finished my second spin, my roommate popped back up. I handed the phone back to her, careful not to take my eyes off the camera as I waited for her to have a secure hold on it.
As soon as she had a hold of the phone, I immediately dropped to the ground out of frame…
…to grab the four lemons sitting on the floor in front of me.
When I was done with the lemons, I let go, allowing them to drop into the bowl filled with dish towels below me. I then grabbed a bouquet of flowers from my roommate, who had exchanged the cupcake for them when she’d ducked as I was spinning moments before!
Finally, the scene ends with me holding on to the flowers. Sound chaotic enough?
Once I had finished filming, I assembled all my footage in Premiere Pro. I removed the audio on all of my clips and added the song audio track on top instead. I’d recorded everything while actually singing to the song playing, so it was easy to line my mouth movements up with the audio.
Once everything was assembled, I went one step further and added all the lyrics. I typed out each word in the song and used keyframes to make them appear on the screen at the exact time they were said.
This project was extremely time-consuming, but I had a blast bringing it to life. I learned how long shooting footage can take, even if you have all the scenes planned out. I also learned that planning to cut 5 inches off your hair on a Wednesday doesn’t work very well if you were planning to shoot half a music video on Tuesday and the other half on Thursday… I mean that sarcastically, but in reality, taking the time to think about how what you have going on in your personal life will affect a video project is probably a good idea!