I have edited all the footage that I shot the other day and I think I am pretty happy with it. It isn't perfect but I think it is heading in the right direction. Without further ado this is the initial edit:
I like how it came out visually. I think that is really strong. The background and scene setup worked perfectly I think and the sound design works really well. The sound really helps to pull the whole piece together and give it a really physical, intimate atmosphere. The sounds feel loud and close as it it is happening right in front of you. I also heightened and manipulated some of the sounds to give them real weight and influence in the piece. The milk for example wouldn't make as dramatic and audible sound in real life but I recorded the milk bottle separately doing different motions to accentuate it onscreen and give that moment more substance.
The music is something I scored myself also. I used a reverb pedal I have to create infinite trails. I then plugged that into my Fender Deluxe Reverb amp and used the volume control on my guitar to create an ambient, distanced chord progression that softly washes through the piece. It is subtle but it adds a certain texture that I think works really nicely.
There are actually also a surprising amount of visual effects in the piece too. In the wide shots of the cup for example the two lights were clearly visible:
However, with a little bit of colour grading and some masking I managed to erase the table, lights and the lens flare on the top left side of the screen:
Another visual effect of note that I was quite proud of is the starting shot. Basically the only way to get the top down shot without expensive cranes or in place rigging was for me to point the tripod head I had directly down. The main problem with this of course is that the legs of the tripod are in shot. I needed to mask these out but also on this shot I experimented with a purple filter over the right side light. I decided against this in the edit and so had to use colour correction techniques like Curves and Tint in After Effects to get rid of the hue and dull it to match the rest of the shots in the scene. Here is what the original shot looked like:
And here is what the shot looked like after colour correction and masking:
There are also the shots involving creative rotoscoping which I am particularly proud of. The first being the opening shot in the piece where I placed the VICE logo within the tea canister and wipe it out with my hand:
This I roto'd by hand and added a shadow layer very subtly to the text. It was quite a straight forward task and yielded strong results. The other, more complicated piece of masking was this shot below. This was quite a fun task to tackle. This is the end result:
To achieve this I basically thought outside the box a little. Rather than mask it off with the pen tool by hand I thought I would try using an alpha matte. I noticed that the water was picking up a lot of the light really nicely and so I made a new composition and duplicated the layer. I then added a really drastic Curves adjustment to push the whites to 100% white and the blacks/dark greys to 100% black. Or as close to it as possible. I then used that layer as whats known as a Luma matte. This refers to the luminosity in the layer taking white values as opaque and black values as transparent. This means that it will cut out any layer that is using it as a matte where there are values of white. So when I made the text layer and placed it below the matte layer, referencing it as a matte it cut out the text where the water was at its brightest in real time. I think the end result works really well and works far more naturally and realistically than if I had tried to mask it by hand.
So all in all I am really pleased with the sound, visuals and effects in this piece. It isn't 100% final and finished however, there are still a few rough edges but I will show it to my class as soon as I can to get some feedback as there are a few other ideas I wish to explore.
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