Construction Post 4: Music Video Post-Production

We had to work exceedingly fast to cut and fit all the shots into our timeline. This was due to the fact I knew it would take a long time to green screen all the footage, alongside making all the backgrounds and objects for the scenes, something only I knew how to do.

The first thing we did was to import all our footage into Adobe Premiere Pro. We layered our desired takes into the timeline on alternating tracks. This was done so that we could easily layer newer footage on a higher track then the old. Subsequently, we could revert back to an older version of a shot if we felt an edit didn't look right.

Composition of
layers in the Mars
scene.

We cut the shots to the lengths we had planned in our timeline and storyboard, and also did cutting to the beat where it seemed to fit best  (such as the glow-in-the-dark section). After we felt the cut of the video was finished, we brought each shot individually into After Effects. The reason for doing this was that it'd make it easier when bringing the footage edited in AE back into Premiere.

The majority of the time spent editing was done so using Adobe After Effects. The first thing we had to do for the majority of shots was to chroma key the green screen out. Although seemingly a quick process, it did take me a while of subtle tweaking in order to remove things such as green tint in some of the actors' hair. Furthermore, I had to do some manual masking to remove things that chroma-keying could not. For example, where we had secured the green screen with sticky tape it shone brightly, this I had to mask out manually.

I fiddled with the threshold a lot
in order to have it brighten all the
sticks, but not the background.

Something which we hadn't planned on doing beforehand but I experimented with at the time was increasing the brightness and vibrance of the glow-in-the-dark shots. To do this I added the 'glow' effect to the shots, alongside a 4-way colour corrector. This made the glow sticks appear multicoloured. Feedback from classmates suggested that this made the footage look far more impressive than it did beforehand.

From top to bottom:
Original footage
Footage with glow added
Footage with noise added.

I used fractal noise on an adjustment
layer in order to vary the colour of the
glow sticks.

To make the glow-in-the-dark scenes more interesting, I decided to try to make the individual glow sticks multicoloured. In order to achieve this, I created an adjustment layer and added fractal noise. I then varied the settings until it gave the kind of effect I wanted.

The upshot of this was that it basically acted like a colour filter that was a splatter of various different colours.






Another effect I did was at the beginning of the Mars scene, the first step that Shay takes, there is an ECU shot of her foot hitting the ground. I decided to add dust to this. I used a clip of a dusty impact, and coloured it the same colour as the Mars scene. I also added a sandy 'ground' by getting a rocky sand texture, recolouring it, and stretching it into the Z axis, giving the illusion of depth.

I masked the dust so it would appear in front of the foot.

The same shot, but with the mask enabled, showing the
dust only appearing above the base of the foot.

Another effect that I did was to add the 'paint' under Shayam's finger as she wrote on the walls....

Unfortunately the post-production process took far longer than I would've hoped due to the After Effects projects taking a long time to open, and crashes occurred frequently.

One of the longest opening times for one of the AE Project files.

Grading was mainly done in After Effects, and as the music video progressed the grading would change depending on the colour of the scene and how light/dark we felt it should be. Due to the crashing and long opening times, we didn't have as much time to edit as we would've liked.