Practical Task - Cutting with Audio and Slow Motion

For this practical, I decided to experiment with aligning the speed of a video to the excitement in that particular moment of a sound track.

I went about finding some suitable footage/audio to experiment with. I decided to use clips of rain, as these do not have to be very similar to use without continuity issues.

Here I have two pieces of stock footage which I have sped up to better fit the sound of harsh rain I found. I decided I would have a short intro with the sound of rain and a few shots to establish that it is, indeed, raining, before fading into the song. For the music, I am using Rainy November by Teknoaxe on YouTube, a free music channel.

I shortened the clips, added in the music, and a 3 second fade between the sound clips.

I knew I wanted the video to slow down when the music started. One method I could have used was to split it into seperate clips, and then slow down the part after the music starts. However, this would be a sudden and unnatural transition, so I looked up how to slowly change the speed of a video in Premiere, and found this tutorial on speed ramps.

 Following the tutorial, I added a speed ramp. The yellow line indicates the speed of the video, and the grey markers above it indicate the start and end of the transition.

The jazz track is generally calm with the occasional loud piano chord. I read in an article that sharp sounds such as the beginning of words or particularly loud sounds in songs were a good place to cut clips, so I decided to test this.

The song was mostly bass, but there was a section that had a considerable measure of constant piano playing in it, and I thought this bridge would be an excellent place for the timelapse footage I added to speed up. I added another speed ramp.

Here is the finished product, where I created a video of a rainy day passing to some smooth jazz.

I think this would have worked better if I had more footage to work with, as I had to mostly re-use the same stuff due to free footage being difficult to find. I thought my use of cutting on queue was very effective and I will try to use it in our film opening.