Music Videos Made Easy? Not So Much...

Well, I finally got around to trying my hand at creating a music video from clips from a movie. I’ve downloaded and watched more than a few well made ones created by fans – in my case, mostly music videos made around scenes from the X-Men films. Though I have found a couple for the Firefly TV show as well. I always kind of wondered how they did it, and after some ‘net searching, I found out. I more or less figured these were done by people who had way too much time on their hands, but it looked fun. So, last night, I made one myself, and I’ve got to hand it to those who’ve done it before – it’s not as easy as it looks. Windows XP movie maker actually makes the process not too bad, assuming you’ve already got the source material on your hard drive, and I’m not going into how to do that here. It also has some decent features without overburdening the user. However, it is a little limited in scope – especially the output file, as it only allows saving in WMV format. However, it did the trick. Anyway, back to the video. I used clips of the first X-Men movie and the song “It Doesn’t Matter” by Alison Krauss. It didn’t turn out too bad, considering it was my first video editing effort of any kind. It does make you appreciate the skill and art it takes to make a good music video when you watch them on CMT or MTV or wherever. Trying to tell a story in 4 minutes isn’t always easy. Not to mention the challenge if you want specific shots to line up at a specific lyric or beat of the song. Then you get close to the end and realize you need to work in a few more shots to make a better ending and you’ve only got 10 seconds left of music. It’s lots of fun to make, but time consuming – 6 hours to make a 4 minute video… I read on one of the websites of another fan that making these is addicting, and now that I’ve made one, I can see why. I was quite stoked to have made something half decent, and now want to keep trying to make a better one (my editing and transitions need to be much better). On top of that, I’m hearing songs now and my mind is popping up ideas for music video making possibilities (X-Men, Sin City, Due South, etc). Oh well, that’s what hobbies are for, I guess. Either that, or I’m nuts. If you want to take a look at my rookie video effort, you can download it here. I’m also testing out the site Megauploads.com at the same time, so that’s what you’ll be directed to. You have to wait 45 seconds before the link becomes available beside the logo, but it works. It’s a little under 11MB in size, so dial up users beware. Also note that Megauploads deletes the file after 30 days of no downloads, so if you’re trying to download this at some future point and it doesn’t work, that’s why. If you happen to go to the trouble to download and watch it, let me know what you think, good bad, or indifferent. Hmmm, I guess the next step is to learn how to make my own website so I have somewhere to share all this stuff I’m learning how to make…