Editing - Cutting between the eras

In the pre-production stage of the project, we planned that the era scenes would cut between each other quickly, for example: the 50s scene would end, cut to 70s, then back to 50s, then back to 70s etc., all within a couple of seconds and in time to the music as a way of transitioning into the 70s scene.

When we were filming, we had forgotten about this, and originally didn't include it in our edit. Later we realised that our video was looking quite slow-paced and remembered about this idea, which would make it much more interesting to watch.

This is what it looked like:

When getting teacher feedback on our video, another problem was pointed out to us: usually music videos have some sort of climax towards the end of the song, to match with what is often the climax of the song itself, and this could be reflected in the narrative or the pace of the editing, for example. Our second dance sequence did not fit this climactic role because a dance sequence had already happened earlier in the video.

We came up with a solution to this problem: splitting the screen between the different set-ups.

One way that we tried this was splitting the screen in half so it still looks like one shot:

This didn't work because their bodies weren't in the exact same place, so it didn't look natural.

We decided instead to split the screen so that the shots are repeated rather than split across their bodies, and we would only include vertical splits because to mix between horizontal and vertical split-screens might be confusing for the audience.

We tried splitting the screen both in half and into quarters so all the eras are tiled:

I didn't like this because the different shots looked too small when they were tiled and it looked jarring when it cut between four eras and then two eras. 

We decided to only use vertically-split shots of two or three era, also cutting between shots with only one era. This is our final second dance sequence:

This cut is better than the earlier versions because it is now an effective climax and still cuts between the eras smoothly, but in a more interesting way, without looking strange or confusing the audience. Also, it links all the different parts of the video together, so they all become part of the same story.