About a week ago I was asked to edit a video for the New York Times. It was for an article on tween idol Justin Bieber, who I hadn’t really heard of until Robert Caplin told me he had an assignment to photograph him at a concert last month at Madison Square Garden. He was asked to shoot still photographs only, but he decided to take some video footage as well, and it turned out to be fun content the NY Times ultimately wanted to include with their article about Bieber.

My job was to edit together the video footage and photographs that Robert captured during the concert, showing not only the concert itself but also the backstage going-ons and Bieber’s warm-up session with singer Usher.

When I first began working with the footage, I used several interesting video clips, but then I realized the photos Robert had taken worked even better with the audio captured from his videos. I ended up using around three dozen photographs in all throughout the 2.5 minute video, which I felt helped tell the story…after all, he was commissioned to shoot stills, so why not take advantage of them?

The funniest parts while editing the video was going through the footage of the young girls going nuts in the front row blowing out the sound levels. I also enjoyed Bieber’s walk through the halls in route to the stage when all the girls were clawing after him. In all honestly, I ended up getting a headache after hearing the screams over and over again during the few days it took me to edit the video. I could imagine there’s a bottle of aspirin in Justin’s mom’s purse!

Big thanks to Tay James, Justin Bieber’s tour DJ, for letting us use some of the audio he recorded during the concert.

This turned out to be a fun little project for me. Just like every time I edit a music video, the songs are now stuck in my head and I can’t stop singing “One Less Lonely Girl” and “U Got It Bad”! Ahhh, make it stop!

Check out Robert’s blog post here and the New York Times article here.

Happy New Year everyone!