Slow motion singing

As part of my skills development and research into music videos, I have also decided to experiment with the use of motion control on my performance footage. In videos such as Budapest by George Ezra, they have slowed down the footage to give the appearance of slow motion, yet the speed of the vocals still link with the audio of the song. They achieve this through the use of speeding up the song whilst filming, yet slowing down the footage in post editing. You can see this at certain points especially, with George crowd surfing and singing at a normal pace, yet he is moving in slow motion with all the hands slowly moving him too.

I wanted to consider this as an element of editing I could use on my own performance shots, that would work with the rest of the slow motion in my music video. I decided to film myself singing out of convenience, choosing a song I knew particularly well and speeding it up before hand to achieve the slow motion effect in editing.

I started by editing the song in audacity. I imported Gabriel Aplins song 'Panic Cord' it into the software, as it was a song i knew all the words to so would be easy to interpret once speeded up.

 

I then changed the speed of the song. I increased the speed to 100% to make it quick enough to edit on later.

 

 

This then dramatically reduced the songs length from 3 min 26 seconds to 1 min 43 seconds. In turn this made the voice sound very high pitch.

 

 

 To make it more bearable to listen to, I reduced the pitch to make it sound more normal and less high pitched. I reduced the pitch by 35%, making it the equivalent in sound to the original, just sped up.

 

 

Once I had finished playing around with the song I exported it as an MP3 file that I could easily play when filming.

I then set up my location for filming. I wanted a concept simple enough to achieve, but to have elements to show this slowed down effect that contrasted with my singing. I therefore chose to sit in front of my dressing table and just portray me getting ready (i.e. brushing my hair, putting on makeup, putting on perfume) and singing simultaneously. I positioned the camera on a tripod behind me so only my reflection wads visible, and the objects I was picking up could then be seen. All I then did was play the song on my laptop behind me and commenced with filming.

This was my final outcome of filming. I used one long shot of the whole song. I reduced the speed of the footage by 50% so my actions were dragged, as well as fitting my sped up lip synching back to the original version of the song. This took some experimenting to get perfect and to fit with some of the things I said, but eventually it worked successfully.

 

 

 

Overall I think my investigation into this area of editing was useful in the ideas of my final product. Doing this not only let me experiment in Audacity, a software I'd never previously come across, but also how to match up footage to a song half the speed. This has given me ideas as to what I could put in my own performance pieces of my music video, possibly filming it in both ways so I have the choice later once editing to see which would work best. There are still things I could improve on even in this video, with some parts not exactly linking up correctly, but this is all part of experimentation and skills development, which I have found most useful for the preparation of my music video.