Birdhouse In Your Soul - ID# 329

Oak Park River Forest

Music Video

Entry Description

"Birdhouse in Your Soul" by They Might Be Giants

Copyright Info

Recent Teacher Comments

• 4/30 9:32 am - Lol. I thought this was quite creative and ingenious. Tongue-in-cheek things, so fun effects, and I wasn't mad at it! I enjoyed watching this.
• 3/12 4:00 pm - They might be giants, and you are a pro. Awesome animation in the first 30s. Fake mirror effect is sweet. Nice lighting in the dark room with the close up. This was one of the most creatively risky - mad courage. Audibly laughed at the birdhouse climbing out effect. Portrait animations are cool, beautiful, and detailed. Towel drying the head shot was cool and funny along with so much in this video. Honestly at a professional level creatively and cleverly. Stay original. You've got it.

Judge 1

Positives: Great job with all the experimental editing and animation. You narrative was fun and images fit the tone of the song well.

Improvements: The lip sync felt off to me. The snow angel coloring/lighting did not seem to match the rest of your techniques. Very nice work!

Judge 2

Positives: So, I love this band and I love this song. And you kind of look like John Linnell! All good things. I like that you kept a lot of the feel of the original video and seem to reference it visually but not too often. This is definitely your project, not a version of someone else's. The extensive layering and chroma key work harken back to a time when that was cutting edge technology! But it is effective and this video is genuinely fun to watch. Not an easy task. Your enthusiasm is infectious. The painting coming to life, the three little yous in the bird's nest and the shot with the train behind you. AWESOME. There were plenty of other cool shots in this project but those three stick out to me as being exceptionally well crafted and visually memorable. Study those shots! Notice all the movement going on in the frame. Whenever you have a mostly static shot (especially when layering) you don't have too long before the viewer notices the trick and it starts to get old. The three shots I mentioned are visually interesting but also, don't give your viewer enough time to get bored with it (the modern viewer has almost no attention span. Thanks YouTube).

Improvements: Speaking of no attention span... Trim those shots! As an editor, you ALMOST ALWAYS should be looking for ways to trim your shots down. Faster pacing generally makes things flow a lot nicer. I saw more than a few examples of shots going on too long by only a second or two... but that's enough to distract the viewer and make them lose focus. And reusing shots is tricky. you can get away with it a few times but the more you do it the more it looks like you just should have shot more content. This isn't ALWAYS true... but I loved your setups for your shots and I wish there were more of them! I saw some minor editing problems with your masking. Sometimes parts of your shot go into blur mode because they're not where they're supposed to be. Example at 00:00:29, your elbow. It's minor stuff but the minor stuff tends to get stuck in a viewers head. I find myself suggesting this to almost everyone but, it's absolutely essential to let other people give you notes before you finish your project. Sometimes other people are the only ones who can see the most obvious things. But, like I said, this is minor. Overall, I enjoyed this video very much!

Judge 3

Positives: Super fun, with a spectacularly engaging performance. Several laugh out loud moments. I really appreciated the compositing, but LOVED the animations. I said, "Yeah!" out loud. Congrats, really loved this video.

Improvements: Would have liked a little more care given to production design. Several shots just happened against a blank wall. The lighting stayed pretty flat. Could have used more variety here.

Judge 4

Positives:

Improvements: