So the end of the semester has come and that means FINAL PROJECTS.  As in, three weeks ago we were assigned a final project for my Videography class and I shot and edited this two days before it was due.  That's my work ethic.  I'm going nowhere.

I mean!  Here is my final project, which is a music video for my friend's band.  I know how that sounds but they are actually really good!  But then again what do I know?  A little about everything, but not a lot about anything.  Or something.  Whatever. 

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Considering how little time I gave myself to do this (which, by the way, was not entirely my fault, but yeah it mostly was) I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out.  Like that blue "mist" deal.  That was totally by accident, but it worked!  I don't make my movies, my movies make themselves.  Ugh.  But in all seriousness, if you spend a lot of time making movies you'll find that the best stuff often happens completely by accident.  It's a great feeling.

Anyway I hope you guys like the video and so on and so forth.  Tell me what you think.  And IF YOU WANT MORE I got 'em!  Just ask.

I thought the mistiness was on purpose before I read because at the start they were all smoking on the step so I thought you were trying to make it look like they'd hotboxed that room up or something. Pretty good vid, I was expecting something a lot more wanky because as you say Here's My Project It's a Music Video For My Friend's Band conjures up a certain mental image/video. Keep em comin roman, keep em comin..

the use of the mistiness was intentional but actually filming it was an accident.  I turned the camera on and it was super zoomed in and blurry but it LOOKED COOL so I filmed it (it was the window in the background btw) not knowing how or if I would actually use it.  then i put it over the band footage and lowered the opacity and it looked good. 

and yeah I don't blame you for thinking it would be lame because FRIEND'S BAND + PROJECT FOR SCHOOL usually means shitty movie

ugh yes I'm bumping two topics.  same reason as the other one.  sorry!  this is the last time though.  if people still don't reply then I'll let it go.  but you guys are more critical and therefore more TRUSTWORTHY than my friends so responses would be appreciated!

ok, i'll bite

it's pretty clear you didn't have a whole lot to work with here, but i like the technique and the way you handled it. the editing was logical and well-organized and the "mist" effect with the light was really cool and made it a whole lot more interesting than it otherwise would have been. i actually wanted to see a whole lot more of that and less of your buddies acting like they think moody musicians are supposed to act.

what obviously loses me is that the non-abstract imagery is a bit unstimulating visually, specifically after the 2 minute mark. i kinda buy the first phase for the most part, but the second one loses me almost entirely around when he pushes the guys. just kinda unconvincing.  to signify the change in direction of the song you probably could have relied a bit heavier on a shift in the technique itself rather than "acting" by the people in the piece. but again, part of this is that you didn't appear to have a whole lot to work with. still, you could have just shot some random shit around town and it'd probably be a bit more interesting. given the subject matter of the song, i really think you could rather easily find some visually interesting things out in the world that would apply to the song and make the video as a whole more poignant and interesting. yeah that might be a little bit of a cliche approach to music videos, but i don't really think these guys have the pure stage presence to justify being the sole or even primary focus of a music video.

also i can't understand a word of what's being said in the first few seconds. i kinda suspect this is intentional, but i found it a little jarring, and fiddled with my volume control figuring i just had it low. you might want to have something a bit more uniform with the volume level of the start of the music, even if it isn't something actually in the song itself. band might not like you adding significant audio but FUCK THEM

admittedly, part of this is that i don't find music videos convincing that have a stronger emphasis on the lead singer just standing around singing than it does of compiling a strong visual narrative. that just doesn't do anything for me, and it always feels like some arrogant demand by the artist themselves when they have an uncomfortably large presence in the videos for no good reason. don't know if that was the case here, but that's the conclusion i always come to unless there's something specifically applicable about something the musician is doing or it just goes along with the theme of the video.

i've always felt that the best music videos are ones that endeavor to tell something of a short story relative to the music. this is a pretty basic sentiment, and one you probably agree with as a filmmaker, but i guess i felt that i should say it. maybe tell this band that hundley is WORLD RENOWN CREATIVE PERSON and shove this in your buddies faces and say HEH THANKS FOR RUINING MY GREAT MUSIC VIDEO WITH YOUR UGLY HAIR ASSHOLE.

this is kinda critical, but i had some pretty basic observations to make and i guess that's what you were looking for?? i think i've said it several times throughout this but i think you did a good job with what little you had to work with here. that's the important thing right???(throw buddies under the bus; kick corpses to make sure they're dead)

also should have been more action film noir(i am only saying this half-ironically)

of course take this with a grain of salt because here is my idea of a music video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSypfgn7lfI

(ok this was made in like two hours with unbelievably shitty webcam editing software, exclusively using home movie clips i happened to have but whatever. i don't really think my opinion is necessarily VALID on the matter unless you have a strong belief in music videos making a mockery of otherwise strong source materials.)

The criticisms are great and are exactly why I post these videos.  Yes, I did have little to work with, and I did have too much focus on the singer (that was my fault, not so much that he wanted to be the focus or anything). 

I agree that the imagery in the second part of the song is really very obvious, and my original thought process was to change the technique of the filming to match the change in pace of the song.  The only thing I could really think of was to have him wake up on a GURNEY at the ER or something, which might be a little ridiculous perhaps but the idea would have been to have everything AROUND him being kind of hectic and fast paced, but obviously I don't have access to a gurney or an ER so I couldn't do that.  At that point though I really hadn't given myself enough time to plan things out well enough (I had various issues in the past two weeks that kind of pushed me back, but even so my procrastination was still an issue and I didn't even come up with the idea to just shoot a music video until the last minute) so I kind of just went with the first idea I had.  I had him WAKE UP AND START MOVING and I was hoping that the camera moving with him would reflect the rhythm shift of the song (I tried to make the camera seem FLOATY for the first part and I think I did a good enough job with that).  Practically though it wasn't working out as I had hoped so I just shot that stuff and went with the WE'LL FIX IT IN POST mentality.  But I do kind of like the shot where he says "freezing the poses" and he's just sitting there and I'm like COOL!  Whatever!  I like it.

And Dada you bring up a good point about the song being obvious in its shift and the band is well aware of this and they told me that this isn't the final version of the song, and that I GUESS it'll be less obvious in the final version?  They kept mentioning all this technical music stuff and I'm like DERP DERP.  But, you know, I needed this for my grade.  I got like an 88 or something on it though which is kind of surprising. 

But thanks a lot for the comments guys, really.  I'm aware that as a film maker there is a lot that I need to improve on and since all my friends (at least my non-film major friends, but even my film major friends to a certain extent) are pretty much just going to say YEAH MAN GREAT JOB I kind of need these harsher critiques so I can understand better what I need to do.  I mean yeah some of the comments I get regarding my videos regard issues that I'm already aware of, but it's important to hear that coming from other people as well so I don't just turn into George Lucas or something.