Editing Process Week 4

Now that I have finished cutting all of the shots together I’m now going to start adding the after effects in.

Originally we were going to film the band in a set that we would have built however we thought that by filming them on green screen we could adapt or change the set/background that the band are in. Therefore we shot the band in front of a green screen. By doing this I could use after effects to apply the background and floor that we picked out. The technique used is called chromo-keying.

This is achieved by masking out the band members and making the green, of the green screen, disappear. This is why we had to make sure no of the band equipment, instruments or clothing was green otherwise whatever was green would disappear too.

This keying was done by using the software ‘Key light’ which is part of the After effects programme. When editing I placed an omni light into the composition in order to make the room look more realistic.

By using key light I eliminated the green so the wallpaper and floor were visible.

I then changed the saturation of the layer with the band on in order to make them appear in black and white.

The rain going on throughout the video was a separate layer, which was filmed on black. In order to place the rain over the footage I used the blending tool ‘liner dodge’, which makes the black go invisible. This then left the coloured rain. Almost the same principle as the green screen process of chromo-keying, it’s just that another tool is used and another colour is eliminated. To make the colour of the rain change throughout the video I picked out nice bright colours from the hue tool panel and then got the colour to slowly change between every few shots by picking a different colour.

This part of the editing process was reasonably straightforward. That was until it came to doing the splats of rain at the end of the video to suggest that the coloured rain is colouring the bands world around them.

For the splat effects I repeated the same process that I had done for the background and rain, however this time I had to construct a separate composition, which used an animated splat effect from ‘riot gear’.

This time instead of using liner dodge I used another blending mode, darken, which turned the white see through, then placed this composition into the original and proceeded to edit it in the same way and do another set of keying to remove the black around the splats. This was slightly more complicated and time consuming, which left me editing right up to the end of the week. Because this had taken so long to do there wasn't enough time to do the other after effects idea that we had. We were going to place the band into the puddles in some of the context scenes, however because we didn't had a big enough green screen board on the shoot day to take out on location we decided that we would have to try and edit each shot by masking out the everything but the puddle. This turned out to be very difficult and very time consuming and it was time we didn't have. Also the one shot that we did manage to edit just made the band member in the puddle look like they were in jelly. It just didn't look right.

So putting that behind us, I then watched the video several time to check that I hadn’t or any of my group had missed anything and that was the pop video finished.

Editing Process Week 3

Now that I’ve edited all of the performance shots in I now want to bring in some of the context shots. ‘Now Is Everyone’ are a new band and with a new band, especially it being one of their USP’s, we need to have more performance shot rather than context to reinforce their organic nature. The performance shots show that they can play their own instruments and therefore implies that they wrote the music themselves. It gives the audience watching a chance to start to recognize each band member and form an opinion and view of the band, hopefully a good one.

To give the audience as much time as possible to recognize the band member I have purposely decided to place at the beginning of the video an ECU of each member or their instrument and the immediately straight cut to a mid shot to either reveal the instrument the band member is playing or which band member is playing each instrument. This makes a very clear distinction between is of the band members for the audience.

The lead singer, Elliot, comes across as the front man for the band so I have reinforced this by cutting back to him more than the others in the video. Also I directed the band that only Elliot was allowed to look directly into the camera to give direct address to the audience because this allows a paradox to be created between the audience and the band however because the other members of the band aren’t giving direct address it also distances them from the audience reinforcing that they band are different to them.

During the week I opened final cut pro up as usual only to find that all of the footage had unsynced itself. This took added time that we didn’t really have to sort out. It meant going over all of the clips and resyncing them back to the track.

Now that all of the shots are together I’m going to go quickly back over it and tighten it all up and possibly add or take away some shots to add variety to the video to make it interesting to watch and then I’m going to import it into After effects to start applying some of the effects. 

Editing Process Week 2

I sorted the sound file during the week and uploaded it again onto Final cut pro. Then I began to edit the footage. I started by syncing some of the long performance shots up so that I could use this as a base to intercut other shots in between to start with until I found better or more appropriate shots to replace some of the long performance shots. Also by syncing a long performance shot with the music it meant that any other shots that I inserted I would be able to sync up to the performance shot. This is called lip-syncing and is one of the pop promo blue print conventions that as a group we have decided to use and develop. Syncing the long performance shots was easy enough because I had marked, using markers, the significant beats in the music that we could edit to the week before. The way I began to edit was by picking a shot out placing a marker where the same part of the song started in the clip as in the sound track so that when I dragged the shot onto the time line I could sync it effortlessly. When filming on the shoot day we also recorded sound, this meant each clip had sound with it. So that the sound track quality wasn’t affected I deleted the sound clip that went with each footage clip. I could find the sound clip on the sound bar. I did this process with 5 clips that went from the beginning of the video to the end. This is when it began to get interesting. I’ve decided to edit in all of the performance shots that we want and then start to replace some of the shots with concept shots. This is just so it doesn’t get confusing. By editing to the significant beats it meant that the promo has an pleasing rhythm and cutting pace. 

Editing Process Week 1

To edit the promo I am using final cut pro and after effects. It is a lot easier and faster to edit the video as opposed to last year when I was editing my thriller ‘Angeldust’ because we used an Mpeg 2 SD NXCAM which has a hard disk, this made editing easier because each take is captured on a separate file. Editing time was reduced, bins easier to manage and extended footage easier to handle. Once I had uploaded the footage I sorted the shots out into performance and context shots then I split both of those bins up into good shots, bad shots and good part shots. This was so we could go straight to the best shots without trawling through the others. Some of the bin titles included performance shots, context shots, good shots, bad shots, good part shots, head shots, wide shots, puddle shots and so on.

Once we had sorted all of the shots out I imported the sound track ‘What we See’ and placed it onto the time line so I could start editing to the track. We had a slight problem the first time we tried to upload the song because it turned out that its current format wasn’t compatible with final cut pro. So we are going to take the track and try and convert it into a WAP file instead of a WAV file in order for it to work on the editing software. Once we have corrected the sound file I’ll start be placing markers on the timeline where the significant beats are so I can edit to the beat.