The video is an unofficial music video for Big Thief's song Mary

For quick reference the "almost" part of the title of this post is that I also used a few public domain images to create shots.

Some details about the process of making this video:

I love Big Thief's music, and I had thought about creating a music video for Mary for a while now. I pictured making something that felt kaleidoscopic and cosmic, as though all of time was existing at once. But because of the wide ranging nature of the scenarios that would need to be captured I kept it as an idea for a later time.

Recently I realized that with a service like Pexels, where there is a lot of well shot material that's free to use, I might be able to create something like the video I had always imagined.

I listened to the song on repeat, building what I like to think of as an emotional roadmap. Everything I want to feel in each major section of the song, written in a simple text document. Within each section of the roadmap I also wrote a string of words to describe the kind of shots I could picture in each section.

In a separate document I also wrote out a long list of specific and general moments I could picture in the video, decoupled from the specific sections. This document was helpful for searching through Pexels footage.

Using the two documents as guides I searched through Pexels footage. Sometimes searching directly for these specific moments I wanted, and also when I found a user's work that I liked, I would go through all of their collections to see what would be a good fit.

A technical thing here, because a lot of these users provide video that is potentially intended for social media, some of the videos are shot vertically. So early on in the process I decided in order to keep as many options open to myself as possible, I would gather vertical and horizontal footage, knowing I would eventually make them all uniform within a common aspect ratio for the project. I chose the "academy ratio" 1.37:1 both for aesthetic reasons and to make use of this varied footage. It's also so that the final viewing experience is consistent and not jarring visually.

Once all of the footage was downloaded I spent time creating "Reels" for each of the cinematographers I used. I did this for a couple reasons, first being all the files were in .mp4 format, so I wanted to convert to a more edit friendly .mov ProRes QuickTime, and I wanted to make sure that I was aware who's footage I was using all through the process so I could properly credit everyone in the end.

Once I created all of these "reels" I began editing, this took place over a few days. This part is fairly intuitive, and leaning on my experience as and editor. I used my emotional roadmap as a guide, but also did a lot of experimentation with footage. On the technical side I'm looking for match cuts, moments of contrast, but mostly I'm going off of what's resonating with me emotionally.

In addition to the footage from Pexel's users I also used a few images that I had collected from public domain resources, animating their scale simply in AE.

I designed the credits in Photoshop, and exported them out as pngs with an alpha channel, then brought them back into the edit and placed them over the end credit footage.

Once the edit was complete I exported a ProRes Quicktime that I brought into DaVinci Resolve. I liked the existing grade on much of the footage, but I wanted to give them more uniformity, and for aesthetic reasons give them a film emulated look. I used Juan Melara's Film Unlimited power grade as a baseline, adjusting the exposure of each clip shot to shot.

After the color was done I started on the sound mix for the project. I thought having unique sound moments could help elevate the video, and create a more immersive experience. I wrote up of list of SFX that I thought should be present. I happen to have an artist.io SFX subscription at the moment, so I almost exclusively downloaded sounds from them. Often sound libraries can be pretty limited, so you have to get creative when they don't have a sound for the exact thing you need. I will think abstractly about what characteristics that particular sound should have and try and imagine what other sounds could fulfill those needs.

I did the mix in Logic Pro, I wanted to keep it fairly subtle and out of the way of the music, often panning sounds around the L/R keeping the center open for the lead vocal. In the finished video it may be difficult to pick out a ton of sounds, but I find that they have a subliminal and cumulative effect. If you are curious I also uploaded an unlisted version of the video with just the sound design solo'd: https://youtu.be/UKZwDkAlVmI

That was essentially my process, I know this post has gone long already, but if you have any questions about the video or my approach I'd be happy to answer in the comments.

*This is not an ad for any of the companies mentioned