iMovie 6 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

Music Videos

Few camcorder endeavors are as much fun as making a music video, whether it’s a serious one or a fake one just for kicks.

Of course, your interest in this kind of video technique may depend on your age and taste. But music videos are worth studying, no matter who you are, because they frequently incorporate every conceivable camera trick, editing technique, and shooting style. The day you shoot a music video is the day you can try punching every button on your camcorder, unlocking those weird special effects you’ve never even tried, and using all the unnecessary zooms you want. Better yet, this is the day when you don’t care a whit about microphones or sound. Eventually, you’ll discard the camcorder’s recorded sound anyway. As you splice your footage together in iMovie, you’ll replace the camcorder’s soundtrack with a high-quality original recording of the song.

Figure 3-2. Because you have iMovie, you can pull off a fascinating visual stunt that’s very common in rock videos: the jumping-flea-musician effect, in which, every few seconds, everybody in the scene blips into a new position (or appears and disappears), sometimes in time to the music. (You’re actually creating jump cuts, which you should avoid except when creating special effects like this.) Creating this effect is simple—if your camcorder has a tripod. Just shoot each segment, moving your musicians around ...