What are the steps involved in making one of these music videos? Here you go.
Contact Your Musicians
You can use any means you are comfortable with such as email, Facebook Messenger, etc. I would recommend not texting, so you aren’t overwhelmed with messages!
Choose a Song
You can open up the song-selection process and allow everyone on the project to give suggestions. Once you decide on the song, you can purchase a vocal arrangement or write your own. You can create a backing track for the musicians to use when recording or just have everyone record to a metronome or a click track. Since you’re going to blend them all together, you’ll definitely need a pitch reference, so some musical guide track is recommended. It would be wise to select a constant tempo. This will allow you to edit to a grid and make post production much, much easier.
Instruct Your Musicians on How to Record
Your musicians will likely have varied experience with recording and will probably be using their phones to capture both audio and video. In that case, you need to give clear instructions to ensure everyone captures the best recording possible. Here’s a list of guidelines to pass on to your musicians.
1. Ask everyone to record to your backing track or click track. Have them use earbuds/headphones to ensure there is minimal bleed from the track into the phone microphone. Ask people to not turn up the volume of the track too loud so it isn’t picked up by the mic.
2. Ask everyone to find the quietest place in their house. Remind people not to run major appliances while recording and to limit other sources of noise like dogs, children, etc. Even then, there will be some unwanted noise and an audible hiss from the phone mics. This can be minimized with noise reduction software, which I will discuss later on.
3. Have all your musicians select the part they want to sing (e.g., soprano, alto, tenor, bass, solo, etc.). If you lack enough singers for a section, you can always have some singers record two parts.
4. Ask everyone to find a neutral backdrop, such as a blank wall, with decent lighting for their video. You may wish to send them a screenshot of another virtual choir video to use as a reference.
5. You may want to ask everyone to shoot their videos in portrait mode (vertical) rather than landscape (horizontal). This will make video editing simpler and cleaner. The above screenshot is a good example of that.
6. Remind people not to hold their phones while recording. It will be moving around and distracting. You can rest the phone on a solid surface or use a cheap phone tripod. I like using an iKlip Xpand Mini attached to a mic stand when I record with my phone.
7. Ask everyone to upload their videos to a shared folder through a service like Google Drive or Dropbox. Alternatively, using services like WeTransfer or Hightail will work, but uploading all of them to a single location will allow you to be more organized throughout the editing process.
8. Once everyone has uploaded their videos, download them to a designated folder on your computer or hard drive.
Now for the fun part: editing!
by Jacob Dupre, Sweetwater | Read more:
Image: uncredited
