Carysmatic- music video

I was using some of the facilities at uni for my 'Ah shoot' Project when I got talking to Matt about this music video that he has in the pipeline and I thought it was a fantastic opportunity for me to learn some skills from a professional and show that I have worked in a boutique VFX house. 

I began by editing some of the raw footage using Final Cut Pro which is a software I know very little about but it was not hard to pick up some basic hot keys and effects. We came up with different ideas on how to resolve problems in the video. One problem was that the poets movement was pretty wooden so we had to cut and edit the best of that together. 

The original tone for the video was going to be black, white with certain red objects in the scene because it links in with the fantasy of a girl so obsessed with her music, as if its her ex lover and she's going through all his stuff. I liked the idea but wanted to give it a bit of a Sepia tone. We discussed that the colour grading will be done in DaVinci Resolve because the AE version created thick red colour bands around lighting sources.

Another problem we had was driven through the first one. The storyline was not clear, which If I think back to when I learnt poetry in school, its supposed to be ambiguous. Matt had the to put text on the wall of the apartment to combine the lyrics with a visual. I took this as an opportunity to create an effect test by taking a scene from the video and finding out how difficult it would be to make text stick to the wall and make it seem as if it was meant to be there. I chose a particularly girly-curly font and scaled it up to make it seem as though it had been spray painted on the the wall in a similar fashion to how I have seen people graffiti their notebooks in school. I then overplayed a load of them on top of each other and using a camera tracker in AE I was able to pin it to a centre wall. There is a bit of a glitch where it moves slightly but the over all positioning works. I created a mask for the window and a mask for when Carys walks in front of the wall. I used a fractal noise to make it seem as though the text had rubbed off and smudged a bit. This gave us a go ahead for any text we want to  put on the wall.

This bit was for personal development. Making the window look as though there was a world outside it. I knew that Matt knew how to do this but I wanted to give it a go so I could take it to him and ask what I was doing wrong. You will notice below that there is a bit of a glitch where the green shows through the mask. I took this too him and he helped me correct it but I kept the original to remind me of how I can fix a similar problem in the future.

At BlueGFX I was able to talk to Niels Stevens, the Representative from Adobe, who asked me why I was not editing the music video on Premiere Pro. When I asked him what the advantage of that was he gave me a demo on how Premire Pro CS6 works seamlessly with After Effects CS6, so I can add effects to comps with out the need to render and export. The only problem with that is, I need a computer which can handle running both programmes simultaneously.