 Imagine watching a fitness video with jazz music or wildlife video with hip-hop. Your clients might think you're crazy for editing videos this way, but as creators, doing crazy things is how we grow. Plus, it's fun. Hey, it's Herman here again with Artlist and today we're taking on an editing challenge where we take a random video theme and random music genre to edit something that makes sense. The point of this exercise is to keep us on our creative toes because thinking out of the box to problem-solve is essential for creators. If you're ready to see what happens, hit that like button and subscribe button and let's get started. So over here we have a wheel with 12 different video themes that can be found on Artlist Max and we're gonna be spinning it today and then throwing this dart at it to decide what we'll be using. I don't know if I can even get this in here because I'm no Robin Hood, but I'm gonna give my best shot. So today we will be editing with animals and wildlife. I have never edited animal and wildlife footage before. Is it going to be like National Geographic? I'm kind of scared. On the other side of this wheel are 12 different music genres that can be found on Artlist and just like before we're going to let our fate be decided by this flying pointy object. So today we're going to be editing animals and wildlife footage with electronic music. The dart didn't stick in there. I'm not a very good dart player, but I did see that it hit the electronic music genre. So we'll be editing animal footage with electronic music. I have no idea how I'm gonna pull this off. No, I'm excited. Let's do it. I'm curious to know what kind of creative exercises you do. Let us know in the comments because I used to feel trapped in this loop of brain-numbing client work. So just like how writers use writing prompts, this challenge is a video editing exercise to prevent our creativity from slowly dying. What we have now are two puzzle pieces that don't quite fit together, but we still want to tell a cohesive story. Not sure how I'll do that, but let's start with the music since that'll set the overall vibe of the video. Now there are so many sub genres to electronic music, so I think that we're just gonna have to browse through Artlist and then find something that'll at least act as our North Star, our Guining Compass to know where we're gonna take this video because I have absolutely no idea. Let's go into genre and then we will go into the one that we randomly picked. Thankfully, I am looking through Artlist and I can download as many songs as I'd like. Make sure to check them out for all your video editing needs. You know what? I can at least choose different moods, right? I don't need to necessarily choose video theme or maybe I can. Maybe there's something that can help narrow down nature. There's a nature video theme for music on Artlist. Let's try it out. I don't really know what to expect. Let's just see right off the bat what it's gonna give me. I can already kind of imagine what kind of footage would go really well with this. I feel like I'm watching a really intense nature documentary. Oh, I'm getting like goosebumps and this is just the first track. I'm gonna pause the music. I'm getting too excited. I think the trick is finding these little hybrids, so it's not just straight up electronic music. It's like electronic and cinematic. It's like a giant monster is approaching. I just imagined this like elephant? A lion? This track actually makes me think if I wanted to go for like a marine animal kind of direction where it's very like whimsical, we see fish swimming around. I thought this would narrow things down and make it easier for me to go through a direction. But now that I'm realizing how many options I have, I'm getting a little bit more lost. I'm of course not gonna try and like force something into a genre. Like I'm not gonna look through like dubstep and now instead of using nature as the secondary tag, why don't we go for mood instead? So let's go for something like there's so many options. Dramatic? Tense? I mean, I like the song. I feel like I'm at a rave, but I don't know about animals going with the song. If I really wanted to force it, something that's very fast like a cheetah running and then the overarching theme could just be wildlife and animals in motion and it's like dynamic animals moving around with drum and bass. Like can you imagine it in your head? That's not a bad idea. I kind of want a variation of this vibe. Like I like how dark and aggressive it is. Imagine if it's not animals running, but it's animals fighting each other. You know when you watch YouTube videos and then you go into a part of YouTube that you don't know where you are anymore? I feel like that's kind of where I am. No offense guy case. You do make wonderful music. I like this track. I don't know if it's going to be suitable for this challenge, but I'm going to definitely save it into my collection. You know how I went down with this anyways? Because I can. All right. We got some music to work with. Let's start actually looking through the footage and remember it's animals and wildlife. So my idea was animals running with drum and bass. Let's do animals and then running. So we got running dogs. So a lot of this footage is like slow mo of animals running. Like this horse one is just like super dramatic, very beautiful, but doesn't really work with the vision that I have in mind. After looking at lots of horse videos and a lot of dog videos, I'm starting to think that maybe this is the direction that's right. So we go with plan B. That's going to be the animals fighting one. I don't know if there's animals fighting stock footage. Oh, I see horns sashing together. Oh, we got elephants fighting too. I think this is it. So instead of drum and bass, let's go back to that kind of like hip hoppy electronic song. This is the first time I've seen fish battle like that. Ah, no spiders. Oh, my worst fear. Ah, there's morph. I'm not sure if that track specifically is going to work, but I do like kind of the vibe of it. It's like a tense hip hoppy electronic song. Trying to find other tracks and it's not working out. So I think I'm going to stick with my gut feeling, which is to go with the track that we picked earlier. I think I'm just going to download all of the footage over here of animals fighting except for the spider ones. So we got antelopes fighting. We got elephants fighting. We got flaming goes fighting. It's going to be a full on brawl. So the time has finally arrived where we actually do the editing in the edit challenge. And I want to see if I can just cut a duration that I think the video is going to be in. So I have kind of like a starting ground. So I want to start over here and get a bit of that beginning so it can build some anticipation. Okay, so we trim the video so that it ends up being around 23 seconds, a lot better than two minutes and 32 seconds. So I want to start things off with some chill shots of animals. So that feels kind of like, Oh, is this like a wildlife documentary? And then it kind of builds into some tension. So I'm hoping that I can get a little bit of animals like turning their head or like being aware of another animal. So something like this, it's just like, Oh, he's like alert, you know, these are going to bridge into the actual fighting. I'm just going to put it somewhere in the middle before the drop the drop is over here in the music. And that's when I want the actual animals fighting. I'm like making a promo video for like some animal fight night. So I like this whole like screaming sea lion. It's like he's intimidating the other sea lion. So that can go over here, maybe. Oh, okay, this could be interesting. It's like the monkey looks over and he's like intimidated, right? So it's kind of like. So we got our basic intro set up now with these placements of variety of animals. I just want to get the broad strokes down. So I have something to start with and then I can go back and refine. So I think the next thing I want to tackle is the actual like animals tackling. So because we have a monkey over here, I think it makes sense if we don't cut to a different animal. I think we should try and stay with the monkeys first so that it has that set up and that payoff. I love that we just see the teeth and he's about to nom on the other monkey. Now that I'm watching this back, I feel like it just doesn't make sense. I know I was talking about the whole thing where it's like, we see a monkey and then we see monkeys fighting. It should make sense, but it just doesn't feel right. So I'm just going to move it to the side. I'm going to try another animal for now and see if we can start strong, you know, and then we'll go back to the monkeys afterwards. So it doesn't feel like I was showing all these animals for no reason. So because we started on flamingos, maybe we can start on flamingos again. So unfortunately, after watching this back, it feels like it starts in the middle of kind of like fighting and I want it there to be like a moment where it's like it ramps up into it and it doesn't start right away. I guess not flamingos. What's the next best thing? I think it's got to be these Rams. It's still not feeling right. We've gone through plan B. What's plan C? If we zoom in to the point of impact, then I think this might be okay. Let's bring in all the moments of the actual fighting. I'm thinking about grouping the shots together that are very similar. So if I see some biting, then I want to see some more biting so that it's not like biting, hitting each other, biting again. Although that's a nice variation to kind of like break things up. I do want there to be some form of coherency. All right, so I got all my shots in here. Some of these are antlers pushing and shoving. This one's like a little bit ambiguous. They're mostly just yelling at each other like and then we got all the biting over here and we're just going to put them in a way where it hopefully makes sense. Okay, so we end probably on this lion. So it feels like, okay, there's one winner. I think it's a hyena. I don't really know my animals. It kind of like backs off and it's just like it ends with some sort of triumph. And that's a good way to somehow close the curtains on things. Okay, so I've got a pretty basic cut ready from start to finish. But I think it accomplished everything that I wanted it to, which is basically just getting the broad strokes there. And there's like a basic story. So it's not just like a montage of random animal shots. I'm just gonna like play with some fades and add some little flashes during the beats of the song. I think I'm going to start importing things into After Effects where I like to just add a bit of spice to things. And usually I'll work shot by shot. But I think in this case, I'm just going to import the entire sequence, which is something that I normally don't do. I'm going to highlight everything replace with After Effects composition. What if we do like a bit of a zoom in here. So it zooms into its eye and then it zooms in here as well. So it almost feels like we're looking at a close-up of the flamingo's eye when really it's going to be this fish. I don't know if it's gonna be really confusing or unnecessary, but we can only try and then find out. Oh, that's pretty sick. I'm just playing with the scale and position right now. I don't want to cake everything with the effects just for the sake of it looking cool. And although this is really cool on its own when they rammed their horns together, I think that we can try adding a wiggle effect that'll just add more to the impact. Oh, you see that? It's like the impact was so intense that the camera had to shake. Just adding some keyframes for the transparency. So just fading in, adding these little black flashes, trying to keep things relatively centered. So it feels like the viewers don't have to have their eyes wander around. They're easy to watch and digest. So I'm just doing some small refinements also just playing with the scale and bringing a little more focus so that we can pay attention to that bite and we can actually see that teeth. Oh man, that is scary. All right, I'm pretty happy with that. Let's render things out. Okay, so we're going to import whatever we just exported. We're going to place it on top of the timeline. Before we move on visually, I want to go back to the sound. So I know we have our music figured out and the duration is all good. We love the vibe of it, but we want to enhance some of these moments with sound effects. Luckily, Artlist has some amazing sound effects in their library. I want to make sure that I'm not just adding it for the sake of it. During this moment, I'm pretty sure a little whoosh won't hurt, right? Let's do that. And what do we got? Nice. The first one, just hit the nail on the head. So during the sea lion roar, I think we can definitely add a sound effect. I don't know if we can actually find a sea lion roar. Sea lion grunting, okay. This is a sea lion, right? Okay, it's a sea lion. So apparently sea lions bark, they don't roar. Learn something new every day. Let's do something a little bit weird. I'm going to mix animal sounds. So I'm going to add a little bit of a lion roar as well. I know it doesn't really make sense, but I don't want it to outshine the sea lion noise. So it still feels genuine, but just to give it a little bit of weight. So that's better. The sound is peaking a lot right now, but we're going to fix that later. Maybe we'll even add a little bit of a riser so that there's a little more of a tension built up because it feels like the roar is just happening on its own and it's a very lonely riser. One riser isn't enough. Let's do like one or two more. Because we're on a beach with a sea lion, maybe like waves crashing. I want to try reversing it and seeing if that will be a more organic sounding riser. Let's do that reverse speed. Nope, don't really like it. Let's hit controls at my most used shortcut. Now the music drops over here, but I feel like there could be a sound effect or two or three that can help sell that impact. Because my biggest concern is that if I put in the sound effect and it sounds like two cars crashing in together, even though I was saying it's not something I'm going for, I do want it to be memorable. And I think this is a good way for it to stand out. It makes people think like, whoa, what did I just hear? And at worst, it doesn't work out. I delete it and we move on. And let's have something with the penguins. I don't even know what I would start with in terms of keywords for this motion. Imagine it put just bowling sound effects. I can't believe it worked. I want like some monkey screaming and I want like a chomp like an apple crunch. It's a little bit loud so it feels really like in your face. We'll have future Herman worry about that and mix it later. We are on our last step finally. Oh, it's been a long journey, but the last one is going to be color grading. Now I'm not going to do anything too intense. So it's hippo shot in comparison to the flamingo. This one's a lot warmer, but if we want a quick and dirty solution, we can go to the color wheels and match. And then we're at comparison view. We can hit the apply match button and then it will try and match to the reference. And it didn't do a very good job. This is not a good example of the power of apply match, but I think it's mostly because all of this is fairly uniform color. This one will try the apply match and see what it does way better. And then we're going to add an adjustment layer. And this is going to be just a color grade that we put across the entire timeline to affect all of our clips. And then I can have something that feels more coherent. Now I like having a bit of that faded film look. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to just do this, lower the shadows a little more, bring up the blacks and then bring down the brightness a little bit. And I think that's it. I think we're done. I think we have something viewable. So let's export it and finally watch back our edit challenge, which again was editing animals and wildlife footage with electronic music. Let's check it out. So that was the challenge. I hope that watching this encourages you to also try something you normally wouldn't to exercise your creativity. You can click the pop up over here if you want to check out our previous challenge. Otherwise, I'll see you in the next video.