Editting

Editing after the first shoot 

After The First Shoot

After our first shoot me and Noora sat down to being editting. Neither of us had used premier or any other video editing software before (apart from in the sessions that had been provided) so everything was totally new. 

We began by arranging the footage, to get an idea of how long the walk actually took. We knew it was roughly the same length of the song but we wanted to see where would need to be shortened or cut or if we would need bits to lengthen the video if it was too short such as adding stills. The footage that we had was roughly a minute longer give or take depending on which clips we used. 

After playing around with the sequencing of the film we experimented with cropping clips, stretching them, speeding things up and so on just to get a feel of the software. We had made sure that we selected the correct frame size before shooting so all of the video clips were the right size once they were imported. 
Although the video clips were the right size we had forgotten to think about the stills so once they were imported on top of the video clips they were way too big and each one had to be reduced in size. This was very time consuming, so the next time we made them the right size through photoshop, although this was also time consuming it was a lot easier than shrinking them down in premier. 

Once the stills were the right size we started looking at how to use them. Our initial idea was to use single stills to overlay the footage, we did this by lowering the opacity of the image and layering it over the top of the video and stretching it out for a few second. We had a few goes at doing this and it looked quite good, if a little dull to be honest. 
Then we looked at a sequence that Noora had shot while Pritta was walking down the steps, just a continuous shot made up of about 10 frames. We arranged the shots in order and played it through and it actually looked really good. We lowered the opacity of each frame and changed the amount of time spent on each frame (so that it would play quickly, as a stop motion should) then played it through again. Now we knew we were onto something, it worked so well. We then realised that this is what the whole video needed to be like. We brainstormed idea and decide what the videos new direction would be. We would keep all the video footage as the base of the video, there was no need to re-shoot that as it was to the standard that we needed and had no problems. We would then go back to the same location and do everything all over again but this time instead of filming we would we shooting multiple sequences from various different angles. This would give us lots of different stop motions to layer over the top of the video. 

We scheduled another shoot on a day with similar weather (the following thursday) with Pritta and instructed her to wear exactly the same outfit.

After The Second Shoot

After the second shoot we returned to begin editing but before we could do any of that we needed to get the stills the same size as the video clips. We also needed to get everything looking the same, colour and lightness wise as there were parts of Picton street in bright sunlight and others in shade. Luckily both of these things could be done in one go. 
I uploaded the images that I had taken and divided them into their sequences. As they were TIFF files they could all be edited at the same time, we decide on a general look that all the images should have and edited them. Once the images were edited they were opened in photoshop, I then chose the correct image size that the shots would need to be and automated them so that they would all be changed into the correct size. 
I repeated this for each separate sequence. 

Creating The Stop Motions

Once all the sequences were prepared the next task was to start turning them into stop motions. Doing this took quite a lot of trial and error. This is the best way we found to do it. 

We would have all the sequences in there own folder to start with 

1. Firstly you need to create a bin, then import all the images from the sequence into the bin.

2. Then once all the images are imported make sure they are in order, then drag them into the timeline, this will show each frame of the sequence as a box side by side. 

3. Each of these boxes will have a duration of 5 seconds, this will obviously have to change otherwise the stop motion won't work. To change this you highlight the whole sequence and then right click, once you've done this you go to speed/duration and change the speed from the standard 5 seconds to your speed of choice we found that between 5 and 12 frames usually worked fine depending on the sequence. 

4. You then need to click Ripple Edit, Shifting Trailing Clips. This will keep all the clips side by side instead of leaving gaps in between each one.

5. And that all you need to do. This will automatically create a sequence in the project panel.

To being editing we thought it would be a smart move to upload the song first, this gave us a solid time frame which we had to work around. The Song was 3 minutes, 18 second.

Stop motion

We then imported all of the video clips and arranged them in order. We had an almost perfectly flowing video. 

Now we had to start adding the stop motions. Adding them one by one in the correct places according to the video. 

This is where we realised this was going to be harder than we thought, unlike the speed/duration you can't just change the opacity of a whole sequence in one go, you have to change each single frame ONE BY ONE! This was a very time consuming and mind numbing exercise, especially if you judged it wrong and had to change the whole thing. 
This was made even harder by the fact that most of the stop motions weren't just one opacity the whole way through, most would have to be gradually faded in and out by a varying degree of intensity depending on the image or the amount of sequences going on at that time. For example starting at 5 and going up in 10's until 90 where it would plato for a few frames and then go back down to 5 or starting at 0 and working up in 3's and so on. Each sequence differed. 

Cutout Stop Motions

We wanted to see what else we could do with the stop motion idea. So Noora came up with the idea of cutting Noora out and just having her body to overlay into the video. This works just the same as the normal stop motion except instead of having the whole still it's only Pritta's body that shows up. This is simple but really effective. This was used twice in the video once as Pritta is walking up the left side of Picton street and a second time as she she walks past the Bristolian cafe. This is very simple but very effective and adds a bit of diversity to the video. It was done by uploading the images to photoshop and removing all of the excess from the images and just leaving Pritta's body. 

Overlaying/enlarging video

While editing we realised that although we had collected a good and varied amount of sequences we had maybe not collected enough while Pritta is walking up the left side of Picton street and the ones that we had collected weren't good enough. All the other portions of the video were fine it was just this 30 second portion, we considered going back and reshooting but the forecast for the next week was terrible so that wasn't really an option. We thought about what we could do and then it came to use. We imported the same video again, layer it over the original and lowered the opacity. We then enlarged it and moved it to the right. This looked really good. We made both run at the same time so that they were mirroring each other. The best thing about this was realised later on after watching it through a few times. As Pritta walked up the street she passed 3 or 4 block colour house yellow, purple etc.  When Pritta passed these house the larger overlaid Pritta was almost projected onto these walls, the contrast between the bold colours and the transient video, work perfectly. This is personally my favourite part of the video.  

Rendering 

Despite using the shoulder brace and trying my hardest to walk carefully there was a lot of camera shake and this was quite distracting, especially while Pritta was walking up the left side of Picton Street and past The Bristolian. So to remove this we (/////////////). In the most part this worked perfectly and really improved the video but in a couple of places where the camera bounced quite a lot it made the video warp slightly. Although this isnt massively noticeable it did bother me but we couldn't find a way around it. 

Adding Sound 

When adding the sound we discussed using Audition but as we were only using a couple of clips we decide to just upload them straight into premier. We had added the song at the start of the video so that was already in place and at the correct volume. We only needed to add the bird so at the start of the video. We faded it in gradually and out gradually as the song began to play. The bird song began at the start of the video accomanied by a black backdrop, this backdrop fades as the birdsong does, to reveal the start of the video. 

Creating the credits 

Although it's not traditional to have credits at the end of a music video we thought for the purpose of thanking people, advertising Joes song and crediting ourselves it would be useful. We created the credits by 

1.Go into New Title 
2.Default Roll 
3.Keep the same width and Height 
4.Choose your text
5.Add everything you want to be shown, Actors names etc.
6.Centre Horizontal
7.At the end, add enough spaces so the text goes of the screen so that once the credits end you are left with a totally blank screen.

For our credits we had them to the left as we had the album artwork for Gokotta on the right side to work as advertisement and showing the album cover at the end of a music video is very common.