Now that I have all my footage, I can finally start editing. I started editing this morning, and it has taken a while to get the clips together. But before I could start editing, I had to find a song that I liked and thought would fit the video well.
I wanted to choose something that was an instrumental to make sure there weren't any lyrics to distract the audience. I also didn't want to use any copyright music, since there wouldn't be much time to contact any music publishers to get the rights to use that music. So, I went on YouTube and searched up "instrumental music copyright free." I found a playlist of around 400 songs that were all copyright free and royalty free. This would ensure that I wouldn't be using any copyright music. Then, I spent around 1.5 hours just searching for the right song. There were many songs that completely didn't fit the genre. Such song types included EDM, rock, opera, acoustic, etc. I was looking for more of an upbeat song to introduce the character and would make the film seem more fun during the biking segments. I also wanted a song that would be good to edit to, so I could cut the music whenever a there was a bass drum hit. After searching I finally found a song that I thought was good.
This music is definitely not mine or made by me. It is made by Jaokim Karud, and it was posted on the RFM - Royalty Free Music [No Copyright Music] channel on YouTube. As done in prior research in my research blog about the sample film openings, these kinds of movies tend to have more uplifting and intense music. They also tend to have some rap music in them as well. So, I chose a song that wasn't too far off from that type of song. To download the song I used a YouTube to MP3 converter. The link is right here -> (YT to MP3 Converter).
With the song chosen, I could now edit the film to my song. It was at this moment, with this thought, that I would not even realize what frustration laid ahead of me. One of the biggest problems when editing was inputting the song file into Premiere Pro. I'm certified in Premiere Pro, so this shouldn't be a problem, right? I can put a file into Premiere Pro without a problem, right? Nope. This most infuriating and problematic obstacle that I faced during this time editing. Whenever I imported the .mp3 file for my song, the file would open into Premiere Pro, but there would be no sound. It would just fizzle out in the beginning and then play no sound.
In the image above, you can see the green sound file on the track. As you can see, there is no sound compared to the blue sound track for one of my clips. This was the problem. At first, I just created a new project file, since I could always just restart as I haven't really made much progress yet. After creating a new project file and inputting the sound clip in, it still wasn't working. Then, I thought that the file that I was inputting was the problem. I opened the file on my windows explorer, and it was working. This made me really confused. I then tried redownloading the file from the YT to MP3 converter as an MP4 file. I thought I could just take the audio from the MP4 file. This turned out as a failure because after multiple attempts to download it on multiple different browsers such as Google Chrome, Opera GX, and Firefox, the MP4 file wouldn't download. Hmm. "Not to worry!" I thought. "Let me just restart my computer." After restarting my computer, I opened the Premiere Pro software again and then tried to input the MP3 file again, but it still wouldn't work. AGHH! How am I going to get any editing done if I can't even input the song? I looked onto Google to find my answer of how to input the file into Premiere Pro. After searching for a solid 20 minutes on YouTube tutorials and Reddit posts, I found an Adobe Support post by "dwrichy," and he had the same problem as me.
One of the post's comments had a solution to my problem. His name was Warren Heaton, and he said that dwrichy should change the file format from .mp3 to .wav.
At this point, I was desperate for a solution to my problem. So, I decided to try this out. After converting my .mp3 file to .wav using a MP3 to WAV converter (link right here: MP3 to WAV converter), I tried to input it into my project. I was really hoping that this would work because if it didn't, I wouldn't know what to do. But, thankfully, it worked. YES! I was so happy. Now, I could finally start editing.
Since I already had all my files in my Google Drive folder, all I had to do was download the files onto my computer for my use. It only took around 10 minutes to download, but it was a hefty download sitting at around 1.5 GB.
With the files downloaded, I could just put all of the files into Premiere Pro, and edit it to the music to make it much more cohesive. I put all of the shots that I needed up until when the character left the house. I was surprised to see that the film was already a minute long. I realized that I had way too many shots and way too much storyline to show in just two minutes.
Just look at how many different shots I had in my footage folder. If I did the math right, there are 81 different shots. If each shot was one or two seconds, this would be fine. But the dialogue take a long time, so I would have to exclude many shots. I deemed that the medals, the phone call, and leaving the house were all necessary to the film. I had to cut a lot of the biking to the bike park. Then, I had to keep the dialogue of the main character meeting his friend and them biking around in the trails. The part that I completely cut out was the next dialogue where they had finished a round of the bike park, and the main character wants to go for more. I was sad to cut this part because I really wanted to show the over-confidence of the main character in the beginning of the film so that he would have to be humbled by his injury. Oh well. There just isn't enough time. Here's what it looked like when I finished editing for today:
As you can see, there are a lot of cuts and many shots included in the film. There was a lot of editing techniques that I implemented today. I used crossfades in the beginning when showing the achievements of the main character. I then used lots of stylized jump cuts of the main character leaving the house to show make the film more engaging and cohesive with the music. I also used lots of cutting whenever the snare hit or the bass drum hit. This made it feel more lively. I also edited the audio to be quiet whenever there was dialogue going on and louder whenever the character was not saying anything or during the biking scenes.
After all of my hard work today, I think it paid off. Most of the editing is now done. All I have to do is wait for my friend Sean to send his voiceover lines for when he is talking on the phone. I can edit the audio to make it more muffled like how a phone call would actually be. I also have to figure out what I should do for the title, and I have to edit the last clip of the film to have scribbles over his eyes to indicate that there is something wrong with them. I can leave the audience guessing for what happened to his eyes, although many people will guess correctly. He will be blind. Finally, I just have to add a couple more clips to the project to make the biking sequence more developed. I think I did a lot of good work today. Hopefully you think so too. Well, until next time. See ya!
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