During the past several weeks I have made contributions to both the music video and the promotional campaign. I have changed between the two during lessons and free time to make sure my time has been split between the two effectively, to maximise our efforts.
For the first few weeks after shooting our footage we suffered severe technical difficulties, resulting in our performance footage having to be converted from 50fps .mts to 25fps .mp4, and us working on a new machine with DaVinci Resolve. During this time we planned our photo shoot and created several mock ups for both the digipak and advertisements, as well as finding a suitable font to use. After getting some concrete ideas we had our photo shoot, and got to work editing the images in Adobe Photoshop. I spent several lessons cutting out Will and I from the blue screen background using the quick selection tool, and then learning to remove the blue reflection fro our leather jackets, using a new colour layer with a dark brush over the image to colour in the blue without taking away the texture and detail of the image.
My main contribution came in the editing process for the music video. While waiting for our performance footage to be sorted out, we imported all our narrative footage into Adobe Premiere and cut together a rough ordered timeline. We then slowed down the appropriate shots and desaturated the colour before exporting the timeline ready to cut together with the performance footage.
Once we were up and running on the new machine I spent time learning the new software. I then took a co-edit position with Ross as we went through syncing up the performance footage and selecting which takes to play when. As a musician I found it useful to watch through the performance as I found it easy to identify if shots were in or out of sync, and when the band played wrong notes as to be able to cut out bad takes. Once we had our final performance timeline we exported it for use in the final project.
I then created a new timeline and imported the final performance export as well as the narrative export. From here I went through the narrative export and cut up the different sections, placing them in appropriate places over our performance footage. I made sure to cut to the beat, and add narrative over any shots that had a strong meaning. There are some parts in the song that we previously agreed to have jump cuts to, so I made sure to include these while cutting to the rhythm of the bass or drums.
After a few days we had our first rough cut with narrative and performance merged together, but identified the narrative was weak in meaning. We then started to plan another shoot in which Ross and Will would fight, after Ross sees the girl with Will. I went through the footage and the imported it into our timeline, shifting some of our existing narrative footage around. Because we shot our fight scene at short notice we used a different camera to the rest of our footage. I went through and matched the colour to our other narrative shots, by reducing the saturation and bringing out the blacks. Once I was happy with the chronology of the narrative I went through and repeated certain shots like the fight and the pills. This was to connote the problems in our protagonists head and time passing.
It was at this point that our timeline on DaVinci Resolve hit its limit, and every time we added more layers it would crash. We made sure we were happy with what we had, and then exported it to a final cut without effects. On a new timeline we imported this export and then added the narrative audio, celluloid film overlays and the widescreen overlay we had planned on using. I went through and made sure that every shot was well framed for the added widescreen filter. Those that weren't I moved up or down appropriately so everything was well positioned. On the celluloid film overlays I reduced the opacity and set the mode to 'multiply' the image, meaning that the black was removed leaving just the grain and distortion we wanted.
Because DaVinci Resolve was still very slow at this point, we had to export our final timeline before we could watch it back. Once watching through multiple times we decided we were happy with our music video.
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