The Rotor Blog
5 Quick Tips for Becoming Video of the Month
Ever wondered how we choose our VOTM picks each month? Here are 5 tips to help you improve your chances of getting selected.
Use quality audio
Great music videos start with a great song. Okay, so what makes a quality song is subjective, but one thing we look for is whether the track’s audio quality sounds professional. We’re more likely to choose a music video whose track is polished and where the vocals and instrumentation are clear than one where the levels are too low, there’s background noise, production quality is rough, etc.
Include enough clips
Whether you’re making a music video using our stock video clips or footage you shot yourself, be sure to fill your timeline with enough clips to match the length of your track. Every month we come across music videos that look great at the start, and then about halfway through the clips start to repeat because the artist has used only 90 seconds worth of footage for a three-minute song. This makes videos look unfinished and amateurish.
So when you’re creating your Rotor music video, definitely make use of that ‘fill indicator’ positioned right above your clip tray. It’s there to help you. It shows you at-a-glance how full your clip timeline is in relation to your track’s length, so you can make sure your timeline is 100% full before you move on to picking your video editing style and effects.
Unify your visuals
Visual consistency makes music videos look much more planned and polished. One foolproof way to get that consistency is to use clips from a single Rotor collection. Our collections group clips that were either shot together or go well together.
If you want to mix clips from different collections, you can still create a polished final video. You just need to be a bit more mindful as you make your picks. You can unify the look and feel by making sure that they share some visual trait. For example, maybe they’re all night shots, or feature a similar colour/tone or colour intensity, or use similar lighting, or all feature the same subject matter (nature, people dancing, etc).
If you’ve found the perfect mix of clips to fit your song and the story you want to convey, but they don’t have a lot in common visually, a great trick is to use one of our editing styles to tie them together. Amber T’s music video for her song Jigsaw (above) is a perfect example of this, where she used our Quaker editing and effects style to turn all the clips black and white. Vertical Grid, Church, Washed, Mix Tape, Charlie, Motown, Retro, Party and Dreaming are just a few of our other styles that will convert clips to black and white or sepia, or add tinted overlays, to visually unify clips.
Put some of yourself in there
We love seeing artists use footage they’ve shot themselves in their music videos. Including shots of you, your bandmates, your hometown, etc, turns up the personalisation factor and is super appealing to viewers—even if you decide to blend that original footage with Rotor’s library clips.
Don’t worry that you’re not a filming expert. Today’s mobile phones take great quality footage. Just lock the focus, hit record, hold it steady, and go for it. As little as four or five original clips can give your music video a uniqueness and authenticity that’s eye catching.
Tagging #rotorvideos and DMs
We can’t consider your video for VOTM if we don’t know about it. So once you post it online, remember to tag it with #rotorvideos so we can check it out. If you’re tagging us on YouTube, you might also want to email or DM us the link as a back up. Unfortunately, we’ve noticed recently that YouTube’s search function is sometimes flakey, and we’ve run into instances where artists HAVE tagged us in their video, but they never appeared in our search list. So if you also email us the link, or tag us on social, it’s less likely we’ll miss it.
Check out past VOTM winners
Want to see want kind of videos Rotor users are making? Check out our April, May and June VOTM, or jump on over to our VOTM playlist on YouTube.
