Deffered Reality ; A world.
Post Production
Okay Listen closely now, this will be hard to explain
My first feeble attempt at something resembling a music video
Okay so this is how it began. It was a dark and scary night , thunder clashed against the high windows in my manor- okay fine I'll start over. It was as always a night of nightmares ; my computer stood bright over my hunched over shoulders my fingers shakily pressed against the bright white of my keyboard keys , as I peeked through one eye and *CLICK*. I started the gut wrenching process of watching my footage. When I say terrible I mean TERRIBLE , that is how much I hated my work at first. One after another in a disappointing haze of bloopers and camera shakiness my world tilted this way and that way - WAIT. Finally the good work start flowing slowly , stuck between terrible camera footage and DISGUSTING camera footage. The process was a long and nasty one , full of self deprecation and egotistical pride with pats on the back.
There! HA , I had selected my and compiled my folder of shots
that could make my work worthwhile.
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I will not pretend for the sake of my examination that all my work that I had even chosen was flawless and *inserts glitter and unicorn gibberish*. It still required a lot of work , with many a affects to be used , and many to be zoomed in to fix their frames and angle. I also will not waste your time with e self defeating action of showing you all the shots I had chosen one by one but I will show you some shots I had rejected and the reason for it ( the way my mastermind cinematic brain works I could just kiss it ( okay but no I am
kidding ))
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Okay now moving on to when I actually opened
Premier pro with shaking hands and feet. Onto a
more serious process description I am now ready
to take you through a nightmare of a ride.
Starting with the first shot that shows the swinging
sheet , I first of course veiwed it in the source
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Off the bat I could see that the frame was a little
tilted and the footage , almost a long shot ( my fault ) ,
I ofcourse than chose first zoom in , tilt the frame
so it seemed like an eye level shot. This was a bit of
a hit and trial situation as I was not as familiar with
Premier Pro as I would have liked. I am compelled to
make you suffer through a video of me getting this
done. I do believe my camera work was not as
strong as I would have liked ( common mistakes
and difficulties I constantly saw in my work involved
shaky footage ( petition to buy me a steadicam ) ,
frames that I had tried taking at eye level were often not as 90 degree as I would have liked , I mishandled the ISO on some instances which resulted in a more grainier footage than I had thought.)
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After putting upboth of the swinging sheet shots , using a denoiser III effect on them from the big red magic bullet software , aI pt up a transition between both the footages ( dip to black) to showcase my black screen.Also can I just add it took me an amazingly long time to figure out the drag and drop feature of transitions in Premier Pro. After the passing of eons , where my body felt like dust and my mouth felt like ash I finally moved on to the next shot , the push out or the dolly out. While I had originally taken it from farther away and had pushed out the camera even more, I saw it did not fit entirely with the way my primary compiled footage looked in terms of proxemic and the way I wanted the camera work to look more like a cohesive story which I believed l had made a bit more difficult for myself by not adding action matches in the name of keeping video conceptual in nature. I have planned to work against this however by cross cutting.
Back to editing , I used once against a denoiser , a stabiliser in effects whilst also zoomig in the video a little to ensure that khudija's body was mearer to the middle of the frame at all times.
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It is Day 97 in the desert , there is no water in sight , my eyesight
is slowly blurring and I might effectively end it just to stop the suffering.
( too much?) Anyway this went on for several more hours I won't go
into details of each and every shot editing techniques I will however
show you the highlights of some of the important parts.
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One thing that I do believe may stand out to you my dear avid reader is my attempt at mixing music. Since I had cast my performer with a guitar i believed it was almost right to try to add an underlying riff to the music. I downloaded Thom Yorke's untitled guitar bass , from rag and bone , decreased the volume added an audio transition in the beginning. Some other things worth noting included my use of colour grading in Premier Pro where I constantly used colour matches in my video to give an overall similar colour tone to the video have it reflect one single viewpoint or concept.
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Something else worth mentioning is my use of overlaying of the ink dispersing in water. First I went to Colour in Premier Pro used curves , played with them till I achieved the haunting aesthetic I required. Now the important part was to make seamless transitions , I overlayed the red ink video by putting it in the sequence right above another video reducing the opacity and adding film dissolves. Though might I mention At one point my computer malfunctioned and all these effects went haywire and I had to start ALL over again.
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The final video looked something like this ​
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Secod cut and third cut .. and I have officially lost count
For the life of me I cannot tell you the difference between these three videos right now.
On a real note, Some of the very valid changes I made were trying to follow my planning as much as I could in editing as my media sir thought that was better than delivering something unplanned. Moreover my experiment with sound mixing did not turn out so well and I was asked ( not so kindly ) to drop it. Some other changes I made involved making the transitions smoother and making some of the shorts shorter to not bore the audience. I do have to add I made more than just 5 versions , I think 12 would be a closer number but those involved minimal changes. Something else I felt necessary to add was the disclaimer in the beginning that would let the audience know that I harmed no animals. ( 2 fishes did die on my watch but I will not be held responsible for that ( whimpers) , the third one is alive and well and thriving ), The last thind was ending the video on a good note , I believed the best way was to use the star logo video I created , it would add a new element to the video as well as add a bit of a star image in terms of idenitifying something with a certain artist.
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We chose a video that my media sir and I both agreed on , it involved a different version of the song and some of the changes I mentioned above. and well , tada..