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A lot of you have been telling me you want me to look at your music videos. Here's how this works, different from when I do music listening: I only comment on a submission if I have something I can teach to the group. That keeps it watchable instead of vanity. Some of it's because I think there's something wrong. Some of it's because I think there's something right. Some of it, I just want to show you how to do better.

You submit, I try to be helpful so we all learn as a group, since I am a nerd who's been doing this forever. I had 74 of these in the queue when I started — if yours didn't make Part 1 or this Part 2, it doesn't mean your video wasn't good. It means I didn't have a teachable angle. I appreciate you sending them in regardless.

Let's get into it.

Jacob's the screaming vocalist on this and shot everything himself. This is a great example of something I keep flagging on the channel: you don't have to go crazy on the filming side if the post-production is going to do the heavy lifting. There are only a few scenes in this video. What makes it work is that the effects move with the beat.

I'd call this mid-fi, not minimum viable. It's a real step up. The one thing I'd push on is the grading — when you're in this kind of black metal world, the hidden hand on a lot of the videos that pop is a teal-and-orange film LUT laid across everything. Look up some of those stash filters from Tropic Colour, drop one across the whole video, and you get a little more air of professionalism without changing the shoot at all.

(Sidebar on me, though: I'm 100% anti-this on the music side. I want to track everything as close to right as I can while I'm cutting it, so there's almost nothing to do at mix. But the manipulation you can do in post for video is genuinely different from what you can do in music while you're going.)

Sean shot this on what looks like a really nice day with one cameraman moving around with him. That's it. And it works because motion drives retention. The cameraman is moving in a way that keeps up with the beat and the energy of the song, Sean is moving with it, and there are a few different scenarios that get cut in to break up what's happening.

This is the type of video where, when people tell me they can't afford to do a video, I genuinely don't understand. This looks a hair nicer than an iPhone — either the lens did some work or the color correction did, but either way: one cameraman, a few setups, a nice day, and the motion of the shooter doing the rest. Very well done and a good example of what people should be doing on a small budget.