Cool Jazz Illusions

For this short video, we were to create a piece that was long on style, that set a mood and was visually exciting. We weren't supposed to create a story, but more of a music video. I worked with a new group of all women--Judy, Emily and myself.
We had one short 2-hour session to film, so we had to stay on campus, which seemed a little limiting. We really had not had a chance to plan what we were going to do because we found out who was in our group as we came to class. But we started by checking out the music room, and found a talented young man there who was practicing on the piano. While he played fabulously for a continuous 45 minutes, we shot him from every angle we could think of. He was a great subject--he never flinched when we were practically on top of him. (He is planning to go to music school next year and study film scoring.)
After that, we went around campus and filmed and shot stills that were more abstract and "art-y". We were inspired by some of the video in Judy's previous group video, Flying Fists. We weren't sure how these things were all going to work together, but we used the camera for as long as we could.
In our editing session, we happened on the format of our video. Emily contributed the music, and we found we were able to cheat the video clips of the pianist into fitting with the jazz music track--music that was completely different from what the young man had been playing. By interspersing the art-y shots in between the clips of the pianist, we were able to capture a mood that really fit with the music. When we saw how it was working, we shot more video and stills over the weekend to add to our abstract video resources. Some of the video we had shot the first night looked great in the viewfinder, but was too dark to see anything. Once we had it all edited together, we added some special effects and titles.