Cool video. Artistic choice filming into the sun.

Derek, I truly enjoyed that. That's real music. That's the real deal and you're recording was lovely. So obviously you're learning something in school. The string background accompaniment was extremely tasty. I fell in love with that.

The video is quite nice. Certainly much more interesting than a slideshow. There are a few comments I would like to make regarding the video however. This was most obviously all handheld. Handheld is cool but it's movement/motion doesn't quite match the music. And I could tell some of the close-up shots were quite shaky and in postproduction there was an attempt to stabilize some of the shakiness digitally which created its own distracting artifacts. While budget may have been an issue here are some other thoughts. A tripod just wouldn't cut the mustard much for something like this. Yes, the camera needs to keep moving around you and it needs to be FLUID in its motion. This can only be accomplished with the help of 1 or 2 devices. One being an inexpensive " Stedi-Cam" like device from said company or many other imitators. Some of these are quite costly and expensive and must be worn as a vest. Others are hand gripable and more affordable. But for up/down and variable height flying shots only a Crane/Jib will do. Some can be had for under $500. Others will set you back a cool $6000 and up. Obviously not practical for a production such as this. But here's something to try something I've done many times before I owned my own Jib. Take a nice heavy base Atlas microphone stand. One of the studio ones with the long boom arm on them. Then you can purchase some additional hardware to convert the microphone stand to a camera tripod mount at the end. Unfortunately this does not provide for a fully articulated pan & tilt head. But it can still provide you with one of those incredible flying shots. I wanted to be able to pan and tilt so I utilized an Atlas microphone stand at adjustable elbow style mount. I put a stereo mic bar on the Mount and left the elbow loose. I then tied a couple of nylon cords to the stereo mic bar by removing the little microphone mounts. This allowed me a mechanical pan and because the elbow was left loose, I could crane the camera up and down to a certain extent by pulling on the reins. I connected my end of the reins with a little piece of wood not much larger than my fist so that I could hold it in one hand. I drilled two holes for the nylon cord. Now I had a crane with some pan and tilt at the end of an Atlas microphone boom that required some additional counterweights. And voilà! Poor man's Jimmy Jib. Later, I had to have the real thing and build up my own crane utilizing one of the Glide Cam crane's. Unfortunately, the cranes that are affordably available have no decent motorized pan tilt heads available. Most pan tilt heads start at $1800 and up! But like so many other things today, there are a couple of Taiwanese units that can be had for between $150 & $250 and while they are not extremely fast & servo controlled, most music videos don't need super fast, especially yours. I must say the sun flares were delusions! I get the impression you're guy was also using a star affect filter perhaps? It flared very nicely. And that reflection off the face of the guitar body was beautiful. I do get the impression this was also not a 3 chip camcorder? And that color could have been saturated up a little bit on numerous shots. Other shots it was a little too rich. Of course that comes under the heading of color correction which is an art in and by itself.

Wonderfully relaxed from a beautiful production
Mx. Remy Ann David