Unfortunately, the entire festival season has fallen apart for my medieval band ‘De Soete Inval‘. Due to Covid, all medieval festivals have been cancelled, so we don’t have a single performance left. But fortunately, we aren’t sitting idle completely!
This weekend we were supposed to play at a festival. The festival organisers decided to create a sort of online alternative and asked us to record a promo video that they could publish this weekend.
Since getting together as a group of five was obviously not an option, we all recorded a video separately. One of us created a base track, and the rest then played or sang their contributions over it. Another band member then mixed all the audio tracks into a cohesive whole in his studio, and finally, I got to work on the video editing!
I really enjoy editing videos. I have by now purchased decent software for it, so I no longer have to curse at Windows Movie Maker. But even so, it is a truly huge job to put something like that together! I spent well over a day and a half on it.
And although I have a good program now, it has its limitations too. For example, you can only choose from a few fixed split-screen templates, which of course don’t quite have the right layout or the right number of frames for what I wanted to do with them. But with a bit of creativity (making a split-screen video and importing that into another split-screen video…), it turned out more or less what I had in mind. Nevertheless: I hope I never have to make a video with so many split screens again that also all have to sync with the audio… 😵
Another challenge was, of course, all the different recordings that were provided. I had explicitly asked in advance for landscape shots in which people were fully visible (cropping is possible, adding details is not), but you still have to cross your fingers and hope for decent material to work with. And sure enough; one clip was constantly shaking, another shot taken from too far away, and others were of poor quality, overexposed, missing the ending, etc.
It also turned out that the outdoor shots contained too much noise to be usable for the audio, and we therefore had to record the sound separately indoors as well (which brings the extra challenge of having to perfectly reproduce the singing, otherwise your lips in the video won’t synchronize with the audio!). But oh well, all that fiddling has its own charm. And that is exactly what I embraced rather than tried to erase, including sighs of relief when it was all finally finished! 😁
For my non-Dutch speaking readers: the song is a duet between a woman who breaks a water jug and her angry employer.
Oh, and that water jug of mine turns out to be incredibly sturdy! I dropped the thing at least 6 times, but not a single crack appeared in it! 😄)