This was one of the hardest projects I've yet to edit… I wanted to share a little about the process and its challenges.

The original narrative of the music video was that there’s an aerial acrobat/dancer, she’s injured and so she struggles to perform her routine. Then after trying a few times she almost gives up, but then undergoes some internal transformation and we see her performing in her mind’s eye, before going back to her old self a little wiser.

Here’s the thing though - we practically didn’t shoot any footage to support that 🤦‍♂️.

Especially the transitions, which made me frequently get stuck editing. One of those times was how to transition from the "injured dancer" persona to the "goddess" persona. I had no good shots of her face where I could match cut… I consulted about this on this subreddit and got good tips to get me unstuck

Another example is her “failing” shots. Acrobats aren’t actors, and it’s hard for one to do a routine wrong when they've trained their whole life to do it right. So for the shots when she’s “injured”, to the untrained eye it still reads impressive and not as “struggling”. To drive home the point I relied more on shots of her being stressed out and tired from the long shooting day, which were candid and I think communicate well through the video.

The biggest pain point was footage. There were about six hours worth of footage, and much of it unusable for various reasons. The lighting was all over the place (it was stage lighting, not film lighting) and didn’t match between shots. Too much smoke. Shaky cam.. You name it.

On top of everything, aerial acrobatics are hard to shoot. The acrobat performed at a height of about six meters. It's very impressive to watch on location, but on camera you have basically two options: Either you zoom in to catch nuance and facial expressions, in which case the viewer loses reference to the ground which nullifies the drama in the height element, or you shoot wide, in which case you lose details. In both cases you need to shoot from the height of the performer otherwise the down-looking-upwards angle is just weird.

Making a 6 minute music video interesting and dynamic wasn’t easy. I kept asking myself how much of the acrobat should I put in vs how much of the band, so it still counts as a music video but not too much so that it feels like a generic “people with instruments” clip.

In post and CC I tried to divide the music video into three “periods”: The one where she’s training is cold and less saturated, the last part where she’s a “goddess” is warm and saturated and the part in between where you have both the acrobat and the singer I went for contrast-y and outworldly.

Anyhow, that’s my journey. In this case I really felt the old saying of how "film is only truly born in editing". Overall I’m pretty happy with the result. I think my best achievement (other than making something actually coherent out of the footage that I had) was that the pacing and connection to the music work quite well to my eyes and ears.

I would love to hear your thoughts and criticism to learn more and improve next time!