"Coming Home" - A Short FIlm About The Importance of Music

I decided that I'm going to post one of my own videos every Friday, so this is the first one. It's called "Coming Home," and it's the first video project I made at U of M. The instructions were to make a short film about a place on campus that reminds you of home. Being in a group, it took a while to come up with an idea that we all could agree on. After a lot of just thinking, fueled by thoughts from others in the group, I had the idea of filming the music building. Everyone (or I guess nearly everyone) can identify with the power music has to transcend both time and space. Listening to music can make you nostalgic by looking back on your past, it can make you look to the future with wonder, and it can help you reflect on the present. Music can transport you to other locations as well, and I really latched onto this idea that the music building is so special because it is a place that people go for music when they need to transported away for a while.

The song was a little piece on the piano that I had been toying with since before the project, and the perfect opportunity arose in which I could use it. I used some amateur recording software to record the piano and violin, and then when it came time to record we played the instruments with the music. In editing, I took out the audio track from the camera and only used the song recording.

I've found that an easy way to edit a video like this (in Final Cut, that is) is to stack all the video tracks on top of each other and then view only one at a time, making sure it's in sync with the music. Once the tracks are all in sync, you can choose which clip you like best and then cut out any other clip that's playing at the same time. I guess if you filmed with multiclip in mind, that would be the easiest, but I haven't had much experience with multiclip, so this is the way I edited this video.

Anyways, without further ado, here's the video. And please, shoot me a comment below. Do you have a better way to edit a video like this? Thoughts on the video itself, or on music as inspiration? Let's start a conversation.