I promised to put together a short video piece for a friend who was doing a photo exhibition in our town of Chalabre, France and then totally forgot about it until the day before.

I had been (and still am) accumulating footage of what happens in the local area for an eventual narrative-driven promo and intended to use some of that for a short piece.

As I was leaving the next day for an event in England, I had about 6 hours to get the job done.

Since it was just going to be an edit to music, and knowing I had plenty of footage, the first step was to find a piece of music that was quintessential France.

I almost exclusively use Audio Jungle for a few reasons. Other sites may have these qualities, but once I found Audio Jungle years ago, I had no reason to look further.

As with any site, you can narrow down your music search by genre and even further by instrumentation, vocals, etc.

Unlike most sites, you can also narrow it down by putting in length parameters (time). Also BPM (beats per minute).

But what I like most is that the music is graphed so that at a glance you can see if there are shifts and changes in the music. (A lot of music for corporate and such uses is rather monotonous with great use of looping and you can see it instantly on the graph).  That at least helps me narrow down the options of what I’ll bother to sample because I prefer a piece with variations.

And, once I’ve found something I think will be suitable, Audio Jungle allows you to down load a preview (with audio water marks) so you can test it out in the edit.

In this case, I spent perhaps 5 minutes to find a suitable piece.

The edit was simply an assembly edit to the music.

No fancy transitions or titles. They wouldn’t have made it any better or made anyone more interested in perhaps visiting this area of France.

Watch it and tell me if this might make you want to come. Or if fancy effects would make any difference in your wanting to come.

If you do…we have Air BnB space for you to stay right in the heart of all this. Indeed our house is right on the village square where several of these scenes were filmed.