This post is to go with my YouTube Video on improving your home recording visuals.
When I first started to create short videos to post on my Facebook Page of myself playing the pieces I’d learned, one thing that was really apparent was that visually, watching someone play piano isn’t vastly engaging for your eyes (it’s mainly for the pleasure of your ears).
How do the experts do it?
If you watch a music video, you’ll have lots of movement and camera angles. Singers and guitarists can run all over the place and filming in cool locations (on rooftops, on beaches) is also common to keep your eyes engaged.
With a piano, you’re much more limited – you can’t really move around much – it’s your hands that do most of the moving. Also, your piano isn’t the most portable of instruments – although admittedly it never stopped the Piano Guys.
However, unless we want to take our Piano up a mountain, we need to think of other ways to add interest and vary the visuals.
If you watch any TV program or film carefully, you will see that the camera rarely stays on the same thing for more than a few seconds … they generally film with multiple cameras so they can go from one camera to another as people speak. When not changing camera angle, they use tricks such as changing the focal point from one person or thing to another to keep your eyes engaged. Pay attention next time you’re watching TV – you’ll see what I mean.
How can we do the same thing?
This where what is known as B Roll comes in handy – and we can apply the same principle to creating a video of ourselves playing. When we were looking at audio enhancement in the previous posts and videos, we only really considered having a single, fixed camera angle taking the video of us playing …. think of this as the ‘A Roll’ – or the main view. Now, we are going to see how we can introduce more interest by adding different camera angles, images and cutting from the main view to alternative views – which can even be things like photos, screenshots of the score or other graphics – and back again. This is the B Roll.
Generally, I’ll film my main view (where I record the audio at the same time) focussing on my hands … here it’s important that your fingers move in time to the music and that you can synchronise the audio and video nicely in iMovie. I then film 2 or 3 alternative camera angles separately (by playing along to the main version I’ve recorded).
For the other views, even if your hands are visible, when they’re not in close up then slight timing issues don’t really show so much. You can even film without having your hands on show so it becomes totally unimportant.
Editing is simpler than you think
All we then need to do is combine this footage in iMovie – which is incredibly easy to do.
I already walked you through basic project set up and incorporating our Audio and Video files into a project. Once we have synched everything up and ‘shared’ it (exported it to a file), we can then use it as the basis for our video editing project. Let’s consider this as the A Roll which is now ready. Assuming we have already filmed our alternative angles, then all we need to do now is combine them.
Import your footage
I won’t got into great detail in this post as you can see this in the video – I’ll just give you an overview to whet your appetite. We first create a new project and then import our newly created A Roll into it and also import our B Roll clips. We put the main clip directly into the timeline.
Cut from one view to another
Let’s say you want to cut away from the main image to a different camera angle – such as a view through the piano. First, simply find a part of another clip that we’d like to use by browsing through it to find the part you want (in the trade, they call this scrubbing).
When playing the clip, you type ‘I’ on your keyboard where you want it to start (for in) and ‘O’ on your keyboard where you want it to end (for out) then you’ll see iMovie identifies the part of the clip you want to use.
All we need to do is drag this selection and place it above the main clip. Don’t worry if your ‘in’ and ‘out’ were slightly wrong, you can easily change the selection further later.
Now, when we play back from a point on the main clip, the image will automatically move from the main view (below), to the ‘B Roll’ view (above) and back again. You can even control the abruptness of this transition inside iMovie.
Repeat this wherever you want to include different views or images.
Yet more ideas
When you’ve finished this process, you’ll end up with an iMovie project looking something like this:
This is not the end though. There are lots of other ways to play with your video in iMovie. As an example, another great effect that I like to use is called the Ken Burns effect – a sort of panning effect. Here, within a video clip, you to choose the starting framing of your video or photograph and the ending framing – such that you get an interesting ‘pan’ effect when it plays.
If you look at the screenshot here, when the clip plays, it will start with the outer rectangle and then as it plays will gradually zoom in so that the smaller rectangle will then fill the screen.
In the video, I show you how to do this and more – I recommend you watch it to get a better idea.
Finally, don’t forget that you can add ‘Titles’ absolutely anywhere using standard iMovie Titles. Again, these add some visual interest to keep your viewer engaged.
Watch an example
On my Tommy’s Piano Corner Facebook page, you can watch a full video of Debussy’s Clair de Lune where I used the techniques outlined above. …. I used an iPhone 8 Plus to record the video for each different angle, got a picture of the moon from a photographer friend, used my Schure MV88 Microphone (available on Amazon at the link below) and my iPhone 6S to record the sound. I used Garageband to add Reverb and EQ to the audio and then iMovie to combine everything together.
Why don’t you give this a try and see how far you can get … I’m sure you’ll be amazed by just what you can accomplish in what is, after all, free software! I look forward to seeing your movies.
