How I made a lyric video from an old news segment I found.
I needed a lyric video for my song "Friction tango"
I recently created a lyric video for a song I released, and I wanted to share a post about how I did it.
When my band, Lorenzo's Music, promotes a song, we usually make three different videos for it: an audio video, a music video, and a lyric video.
The audio video is just a video that has the cover image for the song or album and the song audio. The music videos we post are usually of us performing the song live. But, right now I'm focusing on the lyric video.
What is a lyric video?
A lyric video, of course, is a video where the lyrics are captioned on the screen to go along with the vocals of the song, with some kind of eye candy behind it.
They can be low-effort
I like doing lyric videos because they can just be a basic concept that works with the song, so they are really low-effort. In the past, I've used footage from cars driving, video game play, repeating animation, things like that.
Choosing a concept
This lyric video I'm working on is for a song called "Friction tango" from our album Friction. This song is our take on an old Italian tango song, so I wanted to find something that helped express that.
While I said that lyric videos are a very low-effort, finding the right visuals for the background of the video is the one thing that can take a bit of time.
But luckily, over the years, I found a few places I like to go where I can search for great videos I can use.
Searching for footage to use
There are a few places over the years where I have had great luck searching for video I can use with my band's songs.
Vimeo
Vimeo is a great site to find videos to use. The useful thing about the site is its search function. You can filter the videos by length and by creative commons license. People who release videos under a CC-BY license allow you to remix and reuse their videos.
One of the great things is that a lot of film students and directors release their videos on Vimeo, so there's some really fantastic visual work on there beyond just basic stock footage.
But this time around, I didn't really find anything that worked with the music for the lyric video. So I went to another site that I've used over the years.
The Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is a digital library website that tries to archive digital media. But this one is a bit harder to find a video on. The search function is very old school, but a lot of the videos are also old school, and I figured this would work for what I was looking for. And it did!
Found an old news segment
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| Screenshot of the video on archive.org |
I found this old news segment from the 2000s from The Dance Channel for a stage production called Luis Bravo's "Forever Tango". It had several segments of the performers' tango dancing on stage.
Now that I had the video I wanted to use, I could start editing my lyric video.
Editing the video
To edit videos, I use an open-source video editor called KDENLive, which is a Non-Linear Video Editor. It works on Linux, Windows, and macOS. You can download and use it for free.
Edit out all the interview parts
So, after I imported the video and the audio for the song "Friction tango" into the video editor, I needed to take out all the interview parts.
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| Different scenes from the Dance Channel segment |
The video I found has about two minutes of dancing in it which was enough to use for the lyric video. But it also had an intro graphic and the correspondent was interviewing the performance director. So I needed to take those parts out obviously.
So I chopped it up in the video editor with just the dance parts.
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| Screenshot of the KDENLive video editor |
Added filters
The original news segment was clearly done with a video camera, and it was in color. I wanted to make it look more like a foreign art film. So I added some effects to the edited video track in the timeline.
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| Video track effects setup |
First I added a greyscale filter to make it black & white then a grain filter to add a film texture and adjust the brightness to make it look a little overexposed.
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| Picture example after adding video effects |
Made the lyrics look like film captions
After the video was edited and the filters were added, I needed to add the lyrics to the video. With the KDENLive text editor, I was able to write out the lyrics, then place them where they matched with the vocals in the video timeline.
Since I was going for an art film feel, I wanted the lyrics to look like movie captions. From my experience, the captions in these films also seem to be overexposed. So I adjusted the brightness on the text track in the editor and added a Gaussian Blur to make it glow and bleed into the background a bit.
Watch the video
Here is the finished video for the song "Friction tango" from our album "Friction".