Behind the scenes: Montage Videos - How to make a video with no footage.
Rocky and the Karate Kid would never have fit their improvement into their films if it hadn’t been for montages. Montages in music videos don’t necessarily need to chart improvement, but they are really useful for making a music video out of bits and pieces of footage when you can’t do a proper shoot.
This could be for a variety of reasons, but here’s three videos that were put together from footage unrelated to the song.
Mark W. Georgsson - Oh My Dear Friend
Mark was heading off for a tour of Iceland. Unfortunately he couldn’t afford to take me with him, so I told them to get as much phone footage as possible and then I cut it together to make a music video for one of their tracks. It’s a pretty cheap way of shooting a video and even just footage of walking down the street can look quite exotic to everyone back home.
Phone footage is better than no footage, but the difficulty is that all the different models and makes tend to look a bit different when put together, so you usually need some post processing to draw it all together. This said, you can make a lot of improvements to phone footage by drawing on the advice here.
Al & the Bad Decisions - Wolverine
The band were very active in finishing old recordings during lockdown, but it was pretty much impossible to get a nine piece band in a room for a video shoot during 2020. We’d already done an “everyone send in phone footage” video for Jailhouse Blues
Wolverine was a strong concept, so we were able to pull together old footage of the band and put a comic book theme over it. A few scenes from from Alex lip syncing and a Wolverine morph suit and it was enough for a video. The band don’t take themselves too seriously, so we could lean on some funny comic book captions to make up for the lack of new footage.
We even added a wee disclaimer at the end in case we were sailing too close to some copyright infringements.
Anton O’Donnell - Living Loose
Off the back of a BBC Upload Competition, Anton wrote a wee song. A week later it had been bounced round the world for recording and mixing and he needed a music video. We’d explored various concepts for making videos remotely, but Anton suggested using archive. I sent him a few online resources, and before I knew it, he had a timeline and a list of clips that came together in a lovely way. We added a wee bit of post production jiggery pokery and we’re really happy with it.
It was fast and simple way to put together a lovely video that complimented the song.
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