How to Make a Music Video of Your Children

Family videos are always fun and exciting to look at, but in some cases, scenes may drag on and the video tape may roll on and on forever. To help capture the best moments and make an all exciting look at your children growing up, consider creating a music video featuring your child/children. They are fast paced and exciting and will create great memories for the future.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Video editing software
• Music
• Video clips/video camera

1. Shooting. Shoot your footage like you would normally shoot any other home video. This way you can still have those long home videos and have the most content to edit from.

2. This is not a big Hollywood production, so even if you are shooting video clips off of your digital camera, the quality will be well enough to display on a computer screen or average sized television. Just try to shoot the footage with something so that you can easily upload the clips to your computer.

3. Try to do a theme, like playing outdoors, a birthday party, swimming or something like that. It will help tie the music video together and almost put a story together so that the music video flows.

4. Once you have a lot of clips compiled, upload them onto your computer in an organized fashion. It can be really easy to lose track of what you have and do not have, so create a separate folder for these clips and try to label as many of them as you can.

5. Now you will begin one of the longest processes, cutting and compiling your footage. You can use a simple editing program like Windows Movie Maker, but a more detailed editing program like Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere Pro are more suited for this type of project.

6. As you go through the footage, try to keep your clips around 3 seconds long and stop at a maximum of 5 seconds. This will keep the video interesting and always have something new or different.

7. Splicing up one to two minutes scenes could actually give you over ten shots and that is okay, because the more shots you have the better, as long as they are all short.

8. The only time you should incorporate the use of a long shot is for the very end, beginning or a bridge in the middle of the video to lead to a different them. For example if you are going from the living room to the swimming pool, you could put in a sped-up shot of the children getting their bathing suits on for around 7-seconds.

9. Once you have all of your shots edited down to what you want, mix up the footage in almost a random order. This will add to the creativeness of the video and keep it interesting.

10. Try using special effects on about 5 percent of the footage. This can be anything from slow-motion, sped up and reversed shots. They can add a fun effect to the video, but too much use of this can be overkill.

11. Once the whole video is put together, it is time to pick a song that relates. Some good choices include “Sweet Child O’ Mine” and other children-themed songs, but pick something that child enjoys so they will enjoy watching it as well.

12. If any of the lyrics sound like any of the clips in your video, then try to line up the clips with the audio.

13. Once your video is complete, email it to friends and family and burn a DVD so you have the keepsake forever.

[brock6360]

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