OmniStrata wrote:Standard music works around beats of 8. Sometimes they're fast, sometimes they're slow... But if you can work with multiples of 8 [cut on every 1st, 2nd, 4th, beat] then you've got yourself a working amv with good synchro that won't bore the audience. If you ever want a scene to be 8 beats long, let's hope it's a scene worth having at 8 beats long...
This is sort of how I think as well. I usually try to make a storyboard divided into groups of 8 lines, like this:
-___04 (<- bar #)
- Wind me [1st beat in bar]
- Up,
- put me
- down [4th beat in bar]
- start me
- up and
- watch
-___05 me go [8th beat in bar]
-
And add the lyrics. Some might think this is overdone. It's a hassle to make, but it means you have to listen through the song very carefully to map it out and count all the beats, which means you learn the song very well. And you'd be surprised how much this kind of storyboard helps! It's great for putting down ideas for particular scenes in advance, before you start editing a video (maybe even before you have the source for it).
It also gives you a great overview over a video. You might have a great idea for one of the choruses, and at first you don't think it will matter which chorus you use that idea for. However, planning out the video like this makes you see how the whole song fits together, and you find that using a certain idea for a certain chorus has an impact on the parts of the song just before and just after it. This could mean you want to rearrange or rethink some scenes to make them fit better together, or it could even give you completely new ideas about interesting transitions between scenes that you wouldn't have thought of otherwise. On the whole, it makes you think of your video as a whole that needs to fit together tastefully.
Of course, this will not work for everyone. But even if you think it sounds like too much work, I really recommend doing it at least once; you won't notice the advantages until you try it out.


