I’ve been vlogging for a while now and trying to do it ‘seriously’ for over a year now. I’m slowly feeling more confident in what I do. When I’m out and about filming, I usually can map everything out in my head, and get all the shots and sequences I need. It’s really nice coming home with a Memory Card filled with footage, and I can quickly get it all put together into a (mostly) salient vlog.
Something I’ve felt where my videos have been lacking are the Intros and Outros to them. They were some cards I cobbled together and made appear to Grieg’s ‘Hall of the Mountain King’. It was all just ‘fine’, but just a little ‘meh’.
Someone I’ve met online is fellow theme park geek, and musical composer Nick Hutson. As his bio says –
“Nick is a composer, lyricist, arranger and broadcaster working in both the theme park and musical theatre industries.”
I loved rummaging through his demos, it was awesome discovering that so much music I’d heard whilst at Alton Towers before Christmas was composed by him! Here’s an awesome video about some of his Theme Park music work –
I got in touch with Nick Hutson about the possibility of composing a bespoke version of Hall of the Mountain King. There are countless versions of it online, but i’d not found one that was ‘me’. Nick replied with..
“Why use HOTMK in the first place? I say we come up with a whole new package – with your own ident/tune”
I hadn’t really considered that I could actually have my OWN theme, something completely bespoke to me. Nick needed a copy of my Intro and Outro to score to, but I explained that it was just cards in time to the HOTMK. His response?
“Re-brand!”
I don’t really like change, but – he was right. I needed to re-brand. I wanted to try and suss out a way of tarting up my Intro and Outro. I played around with a few things but nothing worked. Then I discovered I could get some After Effects and Premiere Pro titles from Videohive. There are THOUSANDS of them, so I scratched around for something that really spoke to me. I have After Effects, but I’ve never used it, so I hunted for things that had good documentation.
After a bit of tinkering I managed to get a new Intro and Outro put together. I sent the video to Nick to score to. We spoke about what I was looking for. To be honest, I didn’t really have a clue. Nick went quiet for a bit and came back with a cool Jazz (nice!) theme. It was pretty smart. We then went down a route of ‘funk’, which was a bit ‘bow chikka wow’. Then he sent another piece over, and it just blew me away. It all just worked.
I had to tweak the timings of the intro slightly so it was longer and finished to a black screen. In no time at all, the intro had a perfectly timed score to it, and it sounded AMAZING. Nick created a slightly longer version for the outro. Here’s the finished version of both –
I’m so happy with the finished results. It feels so personal to me. It won’t crop up in someone else’s vlog, I don’t have to worry there will be a copyright claim on YouTube. Obviously, Nick isn’t free, you can’t expect someone to work for nothing. However, getting him to put together something custom for me wasn’t as expensive as I imagined. So, if you want to up your vlogging game with some custom music, I really recommend Nick. He managed to mould my vague brief into something awesome.
All I’ve got to do now is make some more Vlogs. If you haven’t already, Subscribe to my YouTube Channel. Oh, don’t forget to subscribe to Nick’s channel too – his vlogs are almost as good as his music!
