Music Video: Camila Cabello — <i>Godspeed</I>
November 5, 2024

Music Video: Camila Cabello — Godspeed

Modern Post (https://modernpost.com) editor Graham Patterson recently cut Camila Cabello's new music video, Godspeed , which features the artist singing to the camera just off the shoreline, where she's partially submerged.

Patterson cut the 3:45 video using Adobe Premiere and recalls the film shoot taking place on a Wednesday, with him receiving footage by Thursday evening.

"My assistant, Robert Laird, immediately started syncing everything," he explains, "and I needed to have a cut ready for the directors by Friday afternoon. They came in and we sent a cut to Camila that night. We did two more rounds on Saturday and Sunday, locking the cut by Sunday night."

For much of the video, Camila is just head above water, but as the song progresses, quickly-cut flashbacks show her in a number of different settings.



"The first time I heard the song, I knew the music breaks were going to be really fun from an editing standpoint," Patterson recalls. "On the first screening of the footage, I knew I wanted those percussive sections to match the intensity of the music. While I was pulling selects, I set up a separate sequence for Flash SLX, and any time something graphically intense or iconic caught my eye, I’d pull it over. If you could capture a feeling of a shot in a couple frames and it demonstrated her beauty, or her intensity, or a flash of light, or a strong silhouette in the water, I’d pull it over." 

The project marked 91 Rules' first time shooting on film, with Marcel Rev serving as DP.

"I was really glad they did," says Patterson of using film as an acquisition medium. "With film, both the head and tail of the roll often have textures like splices or cue marks. On any in-camera cut or roll, you also get beautiful light leaks, where the film is getting up to speed or slowing down, so I grabbed a lot of those as well."

The video's long takes sort of lull the viewer into a place of tranquility.

"I wanted to use these flashes to smash up that tranquility with a sledgehammer," he explains. "I had a couple of flash sequences ready for the first session and repeated them at each instance in the track. I told Eric and Cameron (91 Rules) that these were placeholders and that we’d refine them based on their feedback and Camila’s. After they left each session, I continued developing or building new flash sequences, so each day they’d come back and find a new one or two as a surprise."



Patterson likens the process of building these sequences to that of creating a collage, where he’s "sticking pieces here and there, moving things around, breaking them down and then putting them back together until it feels right."

Flash sequences are some of his favorite segments to build, and he offers a few tips for budding editors: use light changes, scale changes and even rotate a clip 180 degrees.

"These elements help build a good flash sequence technically, but it also needs to say something," he explains. "For this edit, they’re a symbol of the turbulence and chaos of love, and the mess of a broken relationship. I wanted to make sure the viewer felt that. Sometimes Camila looks stunning. Sometimes she looks a mess. Sometimes she’s calmly drowning. Sometimes she’s smashing the shit out of a piano with a sledgehammer. Together, it all amounts to the feeling of a relationship, where you have so much love, but it’s just not working."

He also had fun with an Easter Egg. Fans who watch closely will see a reveal of her dark hair in the first flashback, but only get a good look much later in the video.