Research Into the Band rehearsal section

For our band rehearsal section we needed to research how to make a music video. Although it's technically not a music video, it's still a band rehearsing a separate song we have chosen therefore we want it to look like they are rehearsing the song. Therefore I looked in lip syncing and how we would shoot the section regarding the play back etc. We will basically have to treat this section of the scene as a music video.

Lip syncing:

I researched how to lip sync a video and although this is a short video, it gives us enough information to lip sync audio with the rehearsal to make it look like the actors are actually playing the song. In our case we will be using the song 'Bird On The Wire' for our band to rehearse to.

How to make the music video: Planning and Shooting

Shooting the music video

• Record the track that you are playing back on set as you shoot. This scratch track will help you synchronize the shots with the clean track in post-production.
• Instruct the singer to sing properly – no half-hearted singing or, worse, miming. If they mumble or mime, it will not look right when you lay the shots against the song, because the tension and movements of the face and body will not be consistent with the sound of the song. They must sing as if you were making a real recording of the song.
• Remember that recording the singer while you shoot and using that copy of the song for the music video is not an option. It simply doesn’t work. You need the definitive recording of the track before you shoot, and the singer must match it exactly. It takes a little practice, and as the director, it is your job to make sure it is being done properly
• Shoot plenty of angles, and make sure that most angles cover the entire song. If you do not shoot enough angles of the whole song, the final edit of the video might be too slow.
• You should also shoot plenty of cutaways, also known as B-roll shots. Use these to give some variety to the video. Some directors intercut performance or dance routine shots with random cuts to shots in which the singer is neither singing nor dancing, but doing something vaguely relevant to the music video’s theme. This jump cut technique is usually disastrous in movies, unless it is used to achieve a specific effect, but it works nicely in music videos.
• It is inefficient to shoot complicated and time-consuming setups that only cover a small part of the song – don’t schedule too many of these.

Editing the music video

• Review all the takes and choose your favourite take for every shot. In practice, you may prefer different sections from different takes. That’s okay, providing of course that there is a cutaway between the two clips.
• Use the waveform picture in your editing application to align the scratch track with the master copy of the track. In this way you will achieve perfect synchronization between sound and picture. Having synchronized the video clips with the track, disable the scratch sound tracks, but don’t delete them from the timeline, because you might need them again later. In this way when you scrub the timeline you will only hear the master track and you will see your music video take shape.
• A nice trick I have used to edit a music video efficiently is to place all the selected clips on the timeline, one above the other on stacked video tracks. They must all be in their correct positions relative to the song, i.e. they must all be synchronized – except, of course, for the cutaways, which can be placed wherever you like.
• To cut from one shot to another, you simply use the razor tool and delete all clips above the one you want. In this way you cut the video without having to drag and drop clips, because that step was taken care of when you synchronized your selected clips with the song. In this way you are effectively switching view from one angle to another, a bit like real-time editing of TV shows. This technique is not applicable to movies, but works very nicely when editing music videos.

Stylistic coherence

• One of the characteristics of high-end music videos is their high level of visual and stylistic coherence.
• Very simply, that means that every shot in those music videos looks like it was designed, lit and directed by the same person. This makes the whole music video gel together very well.
• The importance of this is that many music videos for which I am asked to give feedback tend to lack visual coherence: the shots in the music video do not match particularly well in terms of art direction and lighting, and the music videos just don’t feel like a coherent whole.

However, we don't need to worry so much about the effects as we are just filming a band rehearsal and we would like to make it as realistic as possible.


I looked into the film 'Freaky Friday' that involves a scene where they rehearse with their band and it is a very similar concept we are going for. We will try to go for the kind of look of the scene regarding the way they look like they are genuinely playing the song where they are most likely playing over a backing track. They are also in a garage which is the setting we are looking at so we can use the same kind of shots as they are.