I’ve been recently listening to the Melodic Progressive Station on DI.FM. DI.FM was one of the first online radio networks to go live in 1999, DI.FM has grown into a destination and lifestyle for over 3 million unique listeners who tune in every month.

Sometimes a track jumps out as being a bit special and from there you go looking for it.

One such track for me, is ‘Smile’ by DTALM.

Smile is a really catchy and happy track and it’s particularly popular with my son James. Currently, the track doesn’t have a video, so armed with an excuse to hone my Adobe Premiere editing skills, I set about making one myself.

The cover-photo for the track on YouTube features someone standing facing a field of flowers, so I wanted to incorporate that idea into the beginning and end of the video, but my main theme was going to be showing lots of people smiling for all sorts of reasons.

Fortunately, there is an amazing library of free video clips available at Pexels.com, now ‘free’ is a pretty vague term, but Pexels make this very clear with the following terms and conditions.

• All photos and videos on Pexels are free to use.
•  Attribution is not required. Giving credit to the photographer or Pexels is not necessary but always appreciated.
•  You can modify the photos and videos from Pexels. Be creative and edit them as you like.

Armed with a website with thousands of high-quality videos, I set about searching for ‘smiling’ people.

As you can see, my search returns lots of videos, in fact, LOADS of results! This was good news because I wanted videos that had clips of at least 4 seconds, was at least 1920 x 1080 (which included ‘vertical video’ of 2304 in width) and showed very happy people.

This seemed doable, although a bit of rudimentary maths told me I might need about NINETY clips to fill the six-minute video. Having spent quite a bit of time finding clips and downloading them, I then set about assembling it all into an Adobe Premiere CC project.

Having cut each clip down to about 4 seconds, I then resized it where necessary, colour graded (if it needed a tweak) and in some cases slowed it down using Premiere’s Speed/Duration Tool with using Optical-Flow to smooth the slow-motion footage. As planned I started the video with a lady walking through a field and ended with another lady walking through another field with her little girl. All the other clips with shoehorned in between.

I then did some small edits for timing and then published the video using Premiere’s ‘YouTube 1080p Full HD’ setting via Adobe Media Encoder.

Now, obviously, I don’t own the rights to the music, however, YouTube has a very able system in place to ensure that the correct attribution is made automatically. This can sometimes result in the video not being available in some territories or the rights owner can monetise the video for their own gain. Obviously, I was happy for this to happen as I wasn’t responsible for the hard-work creating the track. I was maybe a little bit more nervous about getting a copyright-strike! Thankfully, this didn’t happen and upon uploading, the video was immediately flagged for the correct copyright attribution and remains available to play (see below).

As a matter of courtesy, I contacted DTALM and let them know I had made the ‘Fan Video’ with a link to it. I received an amazing reply!

So, having waded through my ‘waffle’, please enjoy, my music video for Smile, by DTALM

You can buy Smile by DTALM from Amazon, using the links below.

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