To begin making the video, I gathered videos of various RATM concerts, live performances and rehearsals of ‘Bulls on Parade’ and cut them down to shorter clips that could be used for the advert. Once I was finished gathering clips, I had over 35 minutes of live footage to cut down.
A problem I encountered as I gathered the clips was that most of the videos are from the 90s and early 00’s, which meant that the quality was below 480p on a lot of them, or they weren’t the most eye-catching recordings.
However, after I had added the effects and removed the colour, it wasn’t that noticeable – and the ones that were too low quality I cut out. Once I had cut the videos into small clips, I was able to render most of them into a slightly higher quality than the original.
After I had all my broken down clips, I imported the music video and used the audio of the song. Because the song is almost 4 minutes long, I obviously had to cut it down to two minutes or less. Instead of picking a certain part of the song, I decided to cut it up and fit different sections of the song together. This worked quite well because of the repeating guitar riffs, but in a slightly different key at the bridge. I changed the order of the song but tried to keep the same energy and sound – like when the vocalist says ‘come on now’ at the first interval, that is originally ‘bulls on parade’, but I thought it fit better with the edit, and the clips I had, to change it to that order.
After rearranging the song, I went through my clips as I listened to it, finding which ones fit each part best, while also adding the words. Once I had finished that, I added the effects, and overlays to each clip. I decided to go greyscale to match the music video as well as the aesthetic of the band and mood/themes of the song. I decided to give the video a slightly vintage look, blurring the areas outside the point of focus, adding ‘static’, and vignette.
I also took the overlay from the music video, that has a vintage film effect, and put it over the intro and outro clip of the video. For the end of the advert, I decided to put a short, poster-like card announcing that the song, and album, was released. I chose to make it like it was being recently released, so I found out when the single, ‘Bulls on Parade’, was released, and it was first played live on January 25 1996, later making its official radio debut on February 9, 1996. To follow this, I made the text read ‘This Winter’, to mach the timeframe of its original release. I quickly added sound effects and the last few visual effects, and was ready to export.
When I originally exported the project, I had added an outline to the text between the clips, causing it to not be visible in the final product, so I went back to remove it and slow down the jitter effect so it gave the viewer more time to read what was on screen, as it was already on for a short period of time.
In the final edit, some of the clips are out of time or are paced slightly weirdly because the software was lagging, causing the preview to be very delayed and choppy. The timing was close enough to where it needed to be, so I decided to leave it rather than moving it all around again to save time and not risk losing the order of the clips, as I liked the way the clips fitted to each part of the music they were assigned to.
The final ‘Rage Against the Machine’ card was planned to be longer and a slower reveal, but due to the lagging of the software, I didn’t see how short it was going to be. For the ending sequence, I took the ‘Evil Empire’ album cover and music streaming platform logos (which I cut out and turned into JPEGs) and arranged in the software, along with text. For the sound effects and tv ‘lost signal’ visual at the end, I found clips on YouTube and recorded them. I also made sure to match the texts font as close to the RATM font as possible, using effects to enhance it. I also wanted to do something similar to how they utilised the font in their music video, making it jitter around the screen and reflect the harshness and bluntness of the vocals.
After I had finished editing and I had exported the updated project, I uploaded it to YouTube as an unlisted video.
