Editing Blog: My Favorite Part!

     Hey, we’re on my favorite part now, the editing!

    I began by moving around and cutting down the clips. I had to cut out and cut down many of them to fit the time restraints, but I think it was for the better. I talked about this in my last blog but I ended up being unable to film the scene with the Christmas-decorated house.

    But today I focused on the mechanics of everything, especially making sure the music fits the time requirements and sounds good. The song I chose was “Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas” by Judy Garland. I needed the song to be around a minute long the song wouldn’t play the entirety of the video, it would play after the alarm scene. After listening to the song a few times, I realized that around the one-minute mark, the signing begins to fade out and instrumental music comes in. I took this as the perfect opportunity and decided to cut the song here, however, with the time restraint and being unable to play the music from the very beginning, the cut version of the song ended right before the singing stopped. In order to make this sound more natural I tried a plethora of things. The first thing I tried was to cut the ending of the audio into smaller sections, lowering the volume by 5% on each one. However when I played the song, I realized that it sound choppy, taking a small pause before the next section, I had to figure out a new way to fade the audio out. I then turned to Google in an attempt to figure out a way to achieve the effect I was looking for, it Google didn’t disappoint. On the Apple website, they described how there’s a circle at the end of an audio clip, if you pull it, it will gradually lower the sound from where you place the point. So that’s what I did, however, I quickly realized that figuring out the point where the audio should start begin to fade was harder than expected. My goal was to have the music completely or almost completely fade out by the end of the video, to do this, I would've had to put the fade at the end of the scene before the last. This made the music video sound weird, I was forced to do it that way because of the restraints on my editing software. To combat this I just had to move the beginning of the fade to be earlier as I had no other option.

This is one of my favorite parts of making a commercial! I am almost done with the entire thing, I just need to make it look pretty! See you next time!