I hate to criticize people’s sincere and earnest efforts. But this video shows what it looks like when you have someone trying their best and not just being good at filmmaking. And not knowing what they are doing. The lighting is terrible and unflattering. The color grading is atrocious and also unflattering. The pacing is all wrong and the shots are alternately too static and too rushed, and not variable enough. The editing is also amateurish. There’s a million things they could done to make this better even with the footage they already have. Other than fixing the color grading as it’s really fuckin’ bad, if I could have shot this with roughly their budget and at that location, I’d have started with a very close, still shot of the woman’s eyes and gradually, very slowly, pulled back until you could see her whole face as she sings.

Then, as the song picks up the pace I would’ve pulled back a bit more quickly and started interspersing shots of the snake, the moss, the waterfall. Then at the the bridge of the song I would’ve had a shot of the camera racing down the stream until it reaches the woman banging on the drum (half-body shot here) and done a focus pull from the drum to her face again as the faster part kicks in.

To end the video, I’d done a long follow shot with her actually going down to the rocks and laying down, then shot her directly from above, zooming in again (to close the loop) right on her eyes.

The end. And my version would’ve been way better and more compelling.

I mean, it takes a real lack of skill to take an extremely beautiful woman with gorgeous red hair and make her look cadaverous and unappealing while making a bad video at the same time. But they managed it.