Ultimate Guide on How To Sing in Slow Motion Effect

Ultimate Guide on How To Sing in Slow Motion Effect

Being able to sing in slow motion whilst staying in time with the track is a cinematic effect that is most commonly seen within music videos, but how is it achieved? The effect is actually much easier than it appears, it just requires a bit of practice from the artist.

So, you first want to start off by speeding up your track. Now, I typically like to speed up the track by 200% – so that’s double time, but if the track contains a lot of lyrics or is a fast paced track anyway then this might cause your artist some real difficulties, so just try to speed up the track as much as you can. Now, the next step is the actual process of shooting your footage. Playback the track in double-time on set and get your artist to perform to the music, just make sure that you set your camera to 60FPS. so you can slow the footage down in the edit. This effect looks even more epic when there’s more movement within the frame in this example, you’ll see that I was using two smoke flares to really show off the effect but feel free to get creative. So, once we have our footage it’s now time to get this onto the computer and get it synced up to the track So let’s get into it! Okay, so once we’ve loaded up Adobe Premiere, we’re just going to import the footage, so we’re just going to double click (or right click if you’re on Windows) and import.

Okay, so once you’ve found your footage you’re just going to press import and then we’re just going to create a new sequence. So, we’re going to go up to file, new sequence and we’re just going to call this ‘slow motion’. We’re going to go over to the settings tab and we’re going make sure that the time base is 23976 FPS, the frame size is 1920×1080. We’ve got square pixels and then we’re good to go. Okay, so now that we’ve got our sequence, we’re just going to import our file and now we need to import our music that we performed to, so this is the original version. So, you’re just going to go over to your finder and you’re just going to drag that in.

So once that has been imported, you can also drag that onto your timeline. So a typical camera will shoot in 48 FPS and then you have the option of slowing that down in the ddit. So you go to speed/duration and you would select 50% Once you’ve adjusted the speed, you now need to sync this up to the music. Now this will be fiddly because you are going to have to go through and look at the mouth movement and try and match that up with the correct lyric in the song. So, if you sync that up correctly, you should now be performing in time with the track.

So, to take this effect even further I would colour grade this, so I’ll go over to effects tab, search for lumetri, drag lumetri color on top of the footage and we’re just going to add Basic Correction. So, I’m just going to add the ‘Alexa Default LUT’ and then I’m just going adjust the levels because that’s a bit bright, so I’m just going to drag that underneath the lumetri layer. We’re just going to pull down the gamma, pull up the white input and then I’m just going to add a little bit of saturation in there. So, I’m just going to go over to the fast color corrector, drag that in between the levels and the lumetri color and we’re just going pull the saturation up to around 160%. So to make this look even more cinematic, I’m going to add some anamorphic bars on top of the footage. Now, as you can see I shot in widescreen but adding these anamorphic bars will make the footage look even more cinematic.

So to do this, we want to go over to our project and we’re just going to press this ‘new item’ icon and we’re just going to select ‘new black video’ and we’re just going to press ok. Now we’re just going to drag that on top of that layer and we’re just going to do that one more. We’re gonna select both of these black video layers and we’re going to go over to our effects tab and search for crop. Drag the crop on top of both of these, then you’re going to go over to the top layer and adjust the crop on the top to 85% and you’re going to adjust the crop on the bottom layer to 85% And there you go! There’s the anamorphic bars completed.

The slow motion singing effect is a very cinematic effect and when done correctly it can really help to add a lot of production value and professionalism to your films or your music videos.