TIMELINE

There are several different reasons for doing a timeline. The first of these is to give the producer and director of the video a rough visual of what the outcome will look like. For a timeline, what will happen is that the creative mind behind the music video will think through the video, writing down shot by shot what they think the video should look like. In this you will write the amount of time each shot should last, the shot numbers and the types of shot and if there is any, the movement of the shot. Once this has all been done for the whole song, the timeline will be read through and you will have a chance to see if everything feels as if it would all work together. If it doesn’t, you can then do it again, which saves you making a video that wont work.

What we found by doing our timeline was that we had far to many shots that we felt would last either to long, or didn’t feel as if they fitted in with the rest of the piece. We found that there were too many of the same shots, so we ended up putting more variation into the piece when it came to drawing the storyboard, which will be explained in the next blog.

The timeline is also very useful to structure the narrative part of the music video. For example, if you want to have a story running through the piece, as well as having a performance aspect, you can use the timeline to structure this story and decide when you feel the most suitable parts of the piece would be to include this story.