Hi You!
So, as promised here is my final update on my Time Based Media project.
This past week (aside from doing various wedding / animation related tasks), I’ve been finishing off the music video I’ve been working on for the Rocking Horse track by “NK”.
In-Beat Signage
I’ve added the in-beat signage to the entirety of the music where there are drum beats, and have replaced the “snare” sign posts with “naturally taller” traffic lights. This adds a little more variety to the foreground items.
I’d originally had the traffic lights continue passing from left to right regardless of the direction of travel, but rather than feeling surreal this just proved a bit awkward and distracting. So I scrapped that idea.
As you will see, the drum patterns in the latter part of the track are rather different to those in the earlier part of the track.
To make things easier for me in terms of copying and pasting each sign animation clip, I played the audio/video through within Vegas and pressed “M” in time with the beats as I heard them, which created a range of markers (vertical lines within the project editing window) for later easy placing of the clips.
It required a few listens before I was confident enough to do it, as you might appreciate on listening!
Adding More Interest Early On: Balloons
I was aware that the first backwards pass through our scenery didn’t really add much to what’d occurred in the first forwards pass. So I decided to do something to resolve that.
The key change in this section of the music is the introduction of soft guitar notes, and I wanted the video to react to that.
My original idea was a load of hot air. Hot air balloons, specifically (…sorry). Floating past in the background.
I’d used a similar technique to that for the signs:
- Cutting out balloons from a photo
- Saving as transparent PNGs
- Compositing into a video
- Using Event Pan/Crop to simulate them passing by
To make them fit with the soft guitars within the music, I’d used multiple balloons to come in with each note, and at heights reflecting the position on sheet music:
I was pretty happy with this.
Unfortunately, compositing these into the scenery of the main video without having them appear to be “in front” of the foreground trees proved too complex – it would require chroma keying the foreground trees and placing the balloons in a layer behind that – and the end result featured very obvious white halos around the trees. It, frankly, just wasn’t working.
Adding More Interest Early On: Colour and Light Rays
The balloons didn’t work, but I wanted to add some further interest to the first backwards pass, using the soft guitar parts as my basis.
This time I decided to use the existing footage only. I utilised the HSL Adust effect on the scenery footage to create a “cooler” (green/blue) feel to the scenery when the guitar parts weren’t playing.
Then, in line with when the guitar parts were playing, I composited a copy of the scenery footage over the clip, which had a warmer hue to the base scenery and also extended the length of the rays in the Light Rays effect.
I chopped this so it would only be visible during the guitar parts, fading in quickly (1/10s) with the guitar and fading out slowly (2s) once finished. This gave the feeling that the guitar parts were “shining over” the scenery.
Further Colour Changes
Due to the changes in hue over the first backwards scenery sweep, I felt the journey through the music could be reflected in the scenery throughout the entire video – therefore in the hues are subtley modified into various blue/green/golden hues throughout the remainder of the track. This aids the flow of the video, and continues to enforce the surreal/dream-like feel.
“Tick-Tok-Tick-Tok”
In the final reverse sweep through the scenery, the music is at its most complex – not only through the drum patterns, but also as there’s a “tick-tok tick-tok” effect playing through the track, which I’d only noticed in the past week!
This allowed for a final effect to really build up the video to this peak within the music. I wanted to create a feel of the scenery “swelling” in line with the tick-tok feel in the music.
To do this, I:
- Made an in-synch copy of the scenery layer composited above the original scenery footage
- Used Event Pan/Crop feature to zoom in/out of the scenery footage in the new layer, so the scenery effectively swells/contracts in line with every other tick-tok” beat (doing it on each beat made it look like we were in a rave π )
- Lowered the alpha level of the new clip, so it appears a “ghostly” version of the scenery is swelling/contracting over the standard one – this yet again adds to the surreal/dream-like feel.
Fine-tuning / Improvements
Once all of the above were added, I went through the video to fine-tune existing elements:
- Airplanes – these now have a much less obvious background around them (through some fine-tuning of the Clip Constrast FX plug in and some nursing of the Chroma Key settings).
- Passenger – following a re-shoot of the passenger clip against a painted-white brick wall I could use Chroma Keying to completely remove the original background, so we no longer see two sets of scenery flying past during the intro/outro passenger scenes.
And… that’s it. Phew. All-in-all, I’m pretty happy with the end result:
I hope you agree it’s an improvement on the previous version, and that it fits in reasonably with the music.
If you don’t, then maybe wait a while before telling me. At least until I’ve got my grade back so I can agree/disagree with you. π
‘Til next time!
Pat