Skills Development Journal: Tutorials

Being the first time I have edited footage, especially on Premier Pro -  there were some effects and editing techniques that I hadn't mastered but wanted to use in my video. Because of this I looked into searching for tutorials on Youtube, here are some of the tutorials I found, and how they helped me.
I have overlays over the majority of my video, the aim being to add depth and meaning, especially as the added colours act as a sign

Overlays and opacity

 To create this effect of my actress with the colours falling behind her I needed to create layers and use opacity.
I imported the footage I needed, in this case - my actress lip syncing and extreme close up footage of food colouring going into a bowl of water. I aligned my footage so the overlay was on top of my lip syncing. I then brought down the opacity  of the colour and water because it is on the top, priority, line. To reduce the opacity I just dragged the thin yellow line down to whatever percentage suited, in some cases it would be more because of the lighting.
I don't need to adjust the opacity in the footage of my actress because I want her to be as bold as possible with the colour over the top.

Skills Development Journal; Inspiration for overlays and opacity and researching tutorials

Since filming parts of my music video I noticed that due to having a plain white background, overall it looked quite bare and boring. 
Because of this I wanted to layer and create a more colourful image and overlay this onto my original lip syncing shots.

Here is a shot I liked from Beyonce's music video of 'Check On It'. I like the effect of the rippling pink fabric, even though it is very simple and probably only a short clip on loop, it gives the video more depth and obviously adds emphasis on the girly, feminine and pink style to the video. 

I would like to recreate this for my own video with the use of light colourful material such as netting, I would then add it as a layer on Premier Pro to give the video more depth.


I also liked the use of material in Fifth Harmony's video 'Miss Moving On' which we are told in the backstage video is just plain netting. This is a similar style to Beyonce's netting.

I also want to experiment with water and colours. I am going to drop food colouring into buckets of water and use this experimentation on my video also.

Inspiration for water colour drops is also from this video from YouTube; 

I would want to use extreme close ups, and importantly use a clear glass or container.

I found tips on how I would go about filming and preparing for this footage here; http://www.photographic.com/issue-10-photo-projects/0311food/

Skills Development Journal: Title

In a previous post I learnt how to include a  basic title sequence into my footage. (here)
As I have started editing for my first cut of the video I wanted to experiment with different styles of fonts and sizes until I came up with the font, colour and size I would like to use for my video. 
In the post called 'Music Video Analysis' (which you can find here) I said how I was inspired by Jessie J's music video for 'Wild' in the terms of the text at the beginning. This is how I came to creating a similar style for m

 This is part of the title editing pop up, here you can change the font, colour, style, spacing, and orientation of your text.

I chose to use the font 'Century Gothic' which is already installed on Adobe Premier Pro, I made it bigger and turned it bold. Although I liked the font used for the Jessie J video, I wanted to put my own spin on it and so instead didn't use the exact same font.

 This is a section of the editing bar where you can choose the colour of your text, here I opted for simple white to give a more polished and modern effect.

 Once I had finished editing my text, I imported it into the video editing bar. Because it is a title sequence I wanted it right at the beginning. I aligned it to start at the same time as my first shot.

 This is what the beginning of the music video will look like.

Planning and Research; How to Insert a title sequence

As a planning and research task for my music video I was testing out things I would want to include in my video, this post will be about how I learnt to include a title scene. I also learnt about making the background of the title scene transparent (in this scene it is black) but this will be included in a new post with test footage.

Firstly I clicked on the tab 'Title'

 Then chose to just use a 'Default Still' instead of a rolling title as I think rolling would give an impression that it is a film.

Here I opened a New Title and left the name as the default 'Title 02'

I decided on what I wanted to include in my title, for this example I just used 'Title Testing' but in my real video I will use the song name and possibly my information.

Here I changed the font, size and space between the words to suit the style I wanted. I have circled where I clicked to do this.

After I had added all the finishing touches I added the title scene to the editing bar, I haven't added any footage yet but I could move the title scene to be first, last or inbetween footage.