"I Want You Back" J-5 Music Video Post

JACKSON 5 MUSIC VIDEO BLOG

By Drew McCall

Keeping with the theme of the new blogpost requirements, I am reposting the last video project I posted and I will go far more in-depth about the inception of the project and how we carried it out. 

So here goes.

The purpose of the project was to create a music video using the 6-shot sequence, and we could choose any song we liked and tell any story we thought fit. My group spent some time trying to figure out what song we should do, but eventually settled on the Jackson 5's "I Want You Back" (partly because we liked the music but also because the song itself already gave us a hint as to the story we should tell). So based on the lyrics, we began to formulate an idea of this high-school student that had some history with this girl that he loved madly, but try as he may, cannot win her heart back. That is until she reads his love letter to her that proves he really does have feelings for her. In the end, they become a happy couple again.

This was not a very difficult project in pre-production compared to post-production. While filming was a fairly long but easy process, we ended up filming too much video to include it all in the video the way we would have liked to. The part in the video where our protagonist tries to buy his girl's love was far to long. For my longer version, I tried to keep all of the shots in the video by adding transitions to make the shots fit the length of the song. While this technique worked, it made it look a little too weird and confusing. After showing it to a peer, she said the transitions made sense, but gave her a headache when she watched it. For my second, shorter video, however, I cut all of the extra shots completely, leaving only a scene where he tries to give her a rose which she throws away. I think this was good, but I still would have liked to have included all of the original shots. 

In all, I liked this project but I definitely will remember to go lighter when I'm shooting the footage and only film the necessary shots. I will also be sure to make sure that I will be able to tell the entire story that I want to tell with the given time constraints of the song. This project was an exercise in editing creativity, and I think I passed... But just barely!