Watch Out Music Video | ReMaster

In 2021, this music video debuted on YouTube on May 14. The song, called Watch Out, was composed by the artist Dat Kid Wingz. Directing this project was an amazing experience, and now, more than three years later, I can see how much I've evolved. Reflecting on past work is intriguing because you don't truly realize what you didn't know until you step back and assess your progress. This blog post focuses on growth and self-development.

At that time, I worked under my company, Untouchable Shots, representing myself and my brand. Fast forward to today, I've rebranded as RecFocus, a partnership with another individual (more details on that partnership in a future blog post—stay tuned!).

Reviewing the original video, one thing immediately stood out: I didn't include enough performance scenes or b-roll footage. Initially, this was daunting with the "remaster music video edit" because I had to figure out how to fill in the gaps with limited footage. To keep the video engaging, I relied heavily on masking techniques to maintain viewers' attention. Nowadays, attention spans are shorter than ever, and creating something compelling for even 2 minutes and 28 seconds is a challenge.

At 45 seconds into the video, the tempo increased. I added scenes of law enforcement agents running to enhance excitement and align with the artist's lyrics. By 49 seconds, I switched the artist's background to a jail cell to match the song's lyrics. Without getting too technical, I accomplished this by using a pre-rendered 3D jail model, placing it into Apple Motion, and adding a 3D camera and light source to create a dynamic, immersive effect. To maintain viewer engagement, the lyrics "Watch Out" would occasionally appear on the screen during the video whenever those words were spoken.

Over the past four years, my storytelling approach has evolved significantly. If I were to reshoot this project today, my process would be entirely different. Back then, I didn't always consider how the editing phase would connect with the shooting process. For this video, I had three main performance scenes and nine b-roll scenes from my A camera, plus six drone shot scenes. While I technically had enough b-roll, much of it didn't align with the song's narrative, making it less useful during post-production.

In conclusion, when visually telling a story, creating a storyboard is essential especially if you’re new to making videos. It helps outline what needs to happen and makes the editing process much smoother. The more you shoot, the better you become, so don't overthink it or let fear stop you. Real-world experience is invaluable—no amount of YouTube tutorials can replace it. Mistakes are part of the learning process and essential for growth.

If there's one takeaway, it's this: overshooting is better than undershooting. There's no such thing as too much footage, but not having enough can be a real challenge. That's the lesson today when remastering this music video edit, even though it was shot 3.5 years ago, requiring me to get very creative to compensate for missing shots. In the end, this pushed me to expand my creativity and find innovative solutions, which ultimately worked to my advantage.