Thavy Ear – ‘Drama’ music video

Here’s another music video I made for Thavy Ear. With this video I was pretty much free to experiment with footage I’d shot around Shelly Beach in Manly, including a few takes of Thavy herself.

Most of the footage was shot handheld, if not all of it. Although from memory, I think a few of the shots of crashing waves were shot on a tripod. We weren’t there long, but I was pretty certain I had enough footage by the time the sun had gone down.

For editing the clip, I used six tracks of footage all merged together using blend modes in Sony Vegas. For most parts throughout the clip, there would normally only be three visible at a time. But it worked well. Two of the tracks were vocal takes I’d shot on a separate occasion. Although due to the blend modes used, these would only work in specific parts of the video where the background footage wasn’t too bright, so that Thavy’s face would still be visible.

Whilst editing, I came accross a lot of footage that I hadn’t framed very well, or just had too much movement. For those parts I used either one or two mirror mode plugins, a keleidoscope plugin, or Twixtor to slow down the parts that played too quickly. And sometimes a combination of two of these methods.

Once I had completed the video, it looked very grey and white. And unfortunately, adjusting any of the levels or brightness of the individual tracks would have ruined how they blended together. So what I did was render the video as a whole, load the rendered file into a new project, split it up into all the different shots throughout the video, and then adjust the levels (brightness) of those to bring back all the blacks (giving the video more contrast), before rendering out the final version.

For any questions about the video, feel free to leave me a comment below.

And lastly, here’s a screenshot of the project in Vegas.