Abdullah is the one who handled the post-production stage for our music video and hence, I will let him tell you about it.
In Abdullah's words:
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THE VIDEO IS DONE. IT IS COMPLETE. WE ARE FREE (almost).
Before I put the video on here, I want to talk a bit about the process of editing. Here is a screenshot of the entire Final Cut timeline:
I set Final Cut to 4:3 (1440×1080) and 23.976fps (as is conventional for most film). I mentioned earlier that we wanted to add borders, and that was done by taking a screenshot from A Ghost Story, and using Photoshop to extract the borders. They didn’t come out neat, so we largely reconstructed them using the screenshot as a template.
I placed this on the top layer in the timeline, and then I dragged all of the raw footage underneath it. We also decided to remove the border during certain more climactic moments, particularly during both “drops” of the song.
I began by editing the shot of Humayun hanging upside down. I added an axial focus effect (vertical blurring on the left and right of the video), to give it more of a sense of depth, and then added one of the VistaLUT presets I got for my smash-hit AS project Insaficiency. This LUT mimics the coloring of French New Wave films. In my AS project, the LUT served as a starting point, but the finished product looked almost nothing like it. Here, I didn’t have to do much tinkering; that French New Wave vintage, high contrast, saturated look is exactly what we were going for. What varied between shots was the variant of the LUT I used (there are different versions depending on white balance). In this particular shot, I went with a much cooler white balance. I also added some film grain.
I then copied the effects on this shot and pasted them onto all of the other shots, and edited each shot to meet its specific needs. For example, as mentioned before, I varied the white balance of the LUT in ColorFinale. I also cropped and rotated to fit, like in the shot below. Some shots had to be edited to make the intensity of the sunlight consistent across the video (as some portions were captured when it was almost evening). I also did some fine tuning to make certain colors ‘pop’, like in this shot, where we wanted the red of his eyes to be very striking.
Here’s another example, where I made the greens especially vibrant:
In this shot, I used a warmer white balance, and translated the video to frame it more in line with the Rule of Thirds:
A major challenge throughout was the use of slow motion. Our footage was in 24fps, and essentially every shot before the second verse, which is handheld, (plus the second-to-last shot, where Salman is falling from Humayun’s arms) was slowed down by a significant factor. This was done to give it a more cinematic feel, as well as to give the first verse that sense of calm that we discussed earlier. In order to achieve slow motion, we used Twixtor, which slows footage down artificially, using an algorithm similar to Final Cut’s own Optical Flow feature. Shots were slowed down by varying degrees. Most of the shots in the first verse were set to around 30-40% speed, while all of the shots in the first “drop” were slowed down to around 10% speed.
The slow motion would stutter when trying to significantly slow down shots with a lot of motion, but it wasn’t exactly a stutter – it was a far more artistically interesting effect, where frames would slowly blend into each other. For the shot where Humayun tries to catch Faizan, we decided to use this to our advantage for artistic effect. We then accented it with slow dissolves, as well as the use of PixelFilmStudios’ TransPixel transitions (which I spent $30 on, but we’ll all split the bill). Here are some stills to illustrate how the transition looks. I really liked that, if the video is supposed to look like it was shot on Polaroid, then this transition looks like the film is melting.
Throughout the video, almost all cuts were made in time with the song. I know that this is not usually the case with music videos, but we found it strangely disorienting to do otherwise. We used constant, quick jump cuts in the second verse, which added to the urgency we were going for. Otherwise, cuts were made between different angles of the same set pieces, i.e. continuity editing.
The shot where Salman and his friends are running from Humayun was slowed down to the point where it is almost immobile. This made the shot more cinematic, and it helped capture the fear in Salman’s face. But, it also made the shot less dynamic. In order to fix this problem, we decided to add Final Cut’s stock fake Bokeh effect, to give the shot a greater sense of motion because of the slowly migrating bubbles.
And I believe that about covers it! Before we move on to the actual product, in my next post, I will discuss the ancillary tasks; namely, the artist’s website, and a Digipak for the artist’s album.
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