During Editing 1/2

This is a short part of the video while it was unfinished and different order of the clips, as well as different ways of editing the footage that had been filmed van be viewed. This is at a very early stage in the editing when we were just beginning to compile the clips together, edit and sync them.

At first most of the stock footage was put at the beginning (with the exception of some of the memorial footage that we shot) as we were still new to making a music video and the first thoughts that we had were to make the visuals illustrative of the lyrics. We had the marching soldiers, the long shot of the ships leaving shore, another clip of marching soldiers from aerial view, a soldier's mother with two small children weeping, a young woman crying into her handkerchief, soldiers riding on horses etc etc all together. After much experimentation with moving the footage around we realised it would be better to try a mix of band, stock, and narrative footage that we had in order to give a greater variety of scenes and shots for the viewer to make our music video more interesting to watch.

WIP example 1


We did not use all of the stock footage that we initially had, and cut down on that to use more of our own footage and instead decided to pick the most relevant moments that we wanted to keep. We went for the approach of matching music with visuals keeping the footage edited in sync to the music, compromising between that and relating the visuals to the lyrics. We experimented with placing different clips in different places, e.g. instead of the young lady crying into her handkerchief at the line 'unwed again, in sweetheart's arms/by Christmas, we were dead' we moved that clip to the chorus so the video cut between that clip and a medium close up of the singer's face while he sung 'when she's in need/when she's in danger'. We found that we liked this effect much more as it amplified the lyrics meaning, as 'she' could be taken to refer to both 'she' as in our country to love and defend, or 'she' the young sweetheart that the soldier has left back home who is waiting for him.

The middle parts of the video are not in sync with the lyrics at all but are just an example of the work in progress while editing the clips in different lengths of the veteran pensive looking soldier walking across the field. The final parts of this video from about 0.31 are just experiments in trying to sync the music to the visuals and seeing how they looked at different times, and whether we got them in time, to see if we liked it whether we should keep it or not.