In this series we will be looking at the basics of making a video from the spark of your idea, choosing your software, sourcing your clips, setting up your video project, editing, exporting and finally releasing your video on the web.

Planning is essential, though how much you do is really down to personal preference and what you’re trying to do. In my experience, a straightforward video with clips of your favourite character and scenes set to music should take very little planning… get your music, your clips and start creating! This can be a very fluid way of working, but it’s unlikely to yield anything more than a one-dimensional video…

If you’re trying to tell a story, explore a character’s motivation, highlight something that wasn’t a main part of the source material, or work with an abstract or instrumental piece of music, you can save yourself a lot of heartache if you put pen to paper first. I often find that stopping to think about something – really think about something, will help me to see a storyline in a new level of detail, which helps me to plot the vid. For example, if you’re doing a character vid, you need to get inside the character’s head – they’re not just made up of the words they say and the voiceovers – there are motives behind them. Characters hide things from themselves, supress things that they don’t like, and it’s those aspects of a character that a great vid can bring out. When a character has secrets they don’t want to give up, you need to work at it!

Things you should think about:

- What are the pivotal points in your video? This could be plot points, imagery, events, or maybe a revelation.

- How will you use the song/music to change the mood and where do these changes occur? This will tell you how much material you need to work with and will help you to get your clips together.

- Are there any lyrical or thematic queues that you need specific scenes for? Do they fit with the pivotal points that you’ve identified? If not, you might need to think about a different song.

- How do you want your video to look? If you want to emulate an editing style (for example for a horror movie), do some research by looking at how they are put together, for example, go through the video sequences in ‘The Ring’ frame by frame to see how they do it. This will help you with your own clip selection.

Tackling something a bit more complex? One method I found useful when trying to sort out the plot on Bachelorette was to write down all the plot points that I needed on small pieces of paper and then shuffling them around to fit everything together. Obsessive, I know, but it worked!