Music video - have a ball with After Effects

My latest music video - made with heavy use (in the finished video) of After Effects. Comments and suggestions always welcomed.

Netherlee Junior Choir sing Love can build a bridge to inspire you to act now on a dramatic and looming crisis.

http://www.vimeo.com/2​5619906

Africa is in the grip of what aid agencies are calling the worst drought in 60 years. UN say that more than 10 million people are affected in areas of Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and Uganda. It has sparked a severe food crisis and high malnutrition rates.

Almost half the Somali children arriving in refugee camps in Ethiopia are malnourished, and those arriving in Kenya are little better.

UN humanitarian appeals for Somalia and Kenya, each about $525m, are barely 50 per cent funded, while a $30m appeal for Djibouti is just 30 per cent funded by the middle of July, 2011.

The Netherlee children sing a powerful message to all of us. Stand together and join the tribes of man. Give your heart's desire to others and build a bridge with your love. Don't you think it's time? Give generously to the charity of your choice.

Conducted by Mrs McLachlan
Directed by Stephen West
Sound by Bob Whitney
Film by jeffmurrayimaging.com

There are some scenes in this from Flickr Creative Commons and some from Vimeo. If I have used your footage - thank you so much - it's for a good cause.

is it my monitor or does it seem to be off center i have a black frame around the top right of the video :S

Great video for a very worthy cause. I aplaude you for your work and efforts for the children of Africa.
Thank you!

Effects where pretty cool at first, but then when they just started repeating themselves it got a little over done feeling. Def good ideas though. I also felt like after the overlays had been done to shape the video into hearts and what not, there wasnt much video of the kids singing to see. I felt like I was watching more of the same effects over and over again and not much of the kids. ? Just my two cents.

Here's a tip: When the page turns you really should've cut to a different picture. If nothing happens that makes the transition redundant because it doesn't show anything new.

Thanks all for the feedback. I agree with you Ben and Terjay. I cut this to an After Effects template that I purchased of Video Hive (very good site by the way).

I am a newbie with AE so the task of editing the page turns to suit the video became too onerus [there were multiple camera and light keyframes per page which all would have to be re-edited and re-timed]. In hind sight I should have grown the video out of one of the hearts to full screen for a while to over come the repetitive page turns. After spending two weeks on this, I am done with it for a while - when the final sound file comes in from the recording engineer - I'll will revise it.

Thanks for the kind comments SKMedia and Heimannm. Nivo its a 16 x 9 video ie: HD at 1920 x 1080 resolution - are you on a 4:3 monitor (ie: the old TV size)? If so then it will play in a letterbox - otherwise I am not sure what is happening with your vide0 - there is a slight black border at the bottom of the page.

Thanks all again - I appreciate the feedback and will improve this on the next revision.

Is the girl you keep showing the close-up of a family friend/member? If not, it's kind of weird that in a music video of an entire choir it just shows one of it's members like that, and the rest are shown from the same angle.

The page turning is just annoying and pointless.

Updated - now with 50% less page turns. And I tweaked the sound a little.

Not able to align scene changes with the video sadly, its a two camera shoot and the footage I need to change the scene timings is too shaky as I was moving the A camera at these times.

Also growing the heart out of the page exceeds my After Effects skills (and imte available) for the moment - I got it close but I am not happy with it - so used a page turn for the beginning transition and a dissove at the end of the newly inserted scenes.

Thanks all for the feedback, much appreciated.

Oh... It's a straight up template with modified text and some video put in. That's extremely lazy.

http://videohive.net/i​tem/tree-of-love-book/154430

Yes I said that above - besides I prefer to call it time efficient

I wouldn't consider using a template to be "heavy use of AE".

I would, heavy poor use.

Hey, I just came across this and while I don't know much about video and editing tools/effects, I do know quite a bit about Eastern Africa. Because of that, I simply want to say thanks for taking the time to do something. Its easy to feel badly about the suffering that goes on there (even when famine is not part of the picture) but its only a few who do anything at all about it. Anyway, my family thanks you sincerely. God bless, betam amesege'nallo' .