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.
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 ))
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
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
The final video looked something like this
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.
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..