Cutting to the Beat:

Cutting to the beat is an editing technique that is used in music videos, it is done to cut the visuals to the important part of the backing track (audio) to make more interesting and appealing to the target audience, when you are cutting to the beat, it will ensure that the music video will be quicker paced and faster making the audience enjoy it more and feel more involved in watching it, wanting to watch more when they are watching the video on YouTube or if the editor does not use this technique at all, there is a possible chance that it will look predictable and boring for the audience.

I will be comparing the music video that I helped make in the summer, with the beat edit for the song 'Turn Down For What'.

This here is the first 31 seconds of the song 'Turn Down For What.'
To start creating the beat edit, I first had to download the original track from YouTube and then placing it in to Final Cut Pro. I had to go through the part of the song that I would be using, which in this case was roughly about 30 seconds, I listened to the first 30 seconds of the song and marked all of the points to where there was a beat in the song, to mark all the parts of the song with a beat, I would press the M key and it would mark the point, this is helpful because it allowed me to see straight away where to cut the song and know where to place a knew cut of another shot, this allowed me to cut to the beat.

The song has a fast dynamic feel to it, as it is a dance track,  meaning that there are many more beats in the track to cut to, meaning that a track like this must have beat editing, this is because of the fast tempo, it needs to be matched by quicker and faster cuts to entertain the audience, as all the audience really want is true entertainment, rather than wanting to think about the track in any way.


Lip Synching:
Lip Synching is a very common convention used in music videos, particularly in hip hop music videos, this is for many reasons, but for one, it is because the artist wants to interact with their audience and they want their audience to interact with them to feel involved in the video with them, also, it allows the artist to show that they have the power. It is also common because the artist can show off more of their talent and more skills, so a Hip Hop artist, can show that they can dance and sing within their videos, this can also gain them further viewers and a wider audience share.

I will now be talking about beat editing and lip synching within the music video that was created over the summer, that I was involved in, using the song Thunderstruck, by ACDC.

Beat Editing:
There were many differences between this video and the previous video. There were many mistakes made in this video. Firstly, the location was not correct, as it did not look like a professional music video, as it was only one room, it limited space and was not realistic. There were also not enough camera shots, movements and angles used within the music video. In a proper professional music video, there would be different angles such as a canted angle, or a low or high shot, there would be different camera movements like tilts, not just close ups, mid shots and long shots, which is what we used. By limiting the camera shots used, it gave us less footage to cut to the beat in the post production editing stage, as we only repeated around the same 5 or 6 shots throughout the entire minute, however, we did use cutting to the beat within the music video, but it was not frequent and on a regular basis, mainly because of the limited camera shots taken. This means that is would be boring and definitely predictable for the audience as they are watching, because they can guess what shot is next and probably guess correctly.
In a music video, particularly a rock video, the audience would expect to see the instruments played, through different angles and movements, to be focusing on the instrument that is playing, like a set of drums and with a song like this, other band members were needed to capture the realism, so when we cut to the beat, we were cutting to the same person over and over again, so it became boring for the audience.


Lip Synching:
As already covered, lip synching is important for the artist because it shows that they are in control and also it sells them more and it immediately makes the video more interesting and entertaining for the audience. In our summer music video, lip synching was used at times, meaning that it may have livened up the audience, however, the lip synching was not a frequent occurrence in the video and appeared half way through, by then the audience may have already lost interest with the video because of it's repetitive cutting to the beat.