Week 7: Shoot Anything and Edit It - "Will I Know Peace?"

I spent a deceitfully long time on this to get it perfect. And it worked. This is perfect.

This was filmed a couple weeks ago for a shoot (nice) I was doing sound on, we had the opportunity to do this, and we took it. Huge shoutout to Andrew Koehler for inviting me on the shoot, and filming this video; also shouts out to David Ridder who was also there and sent me the footage and is just a good dude always. Let's go into a break down of the work I did on this.

First I brought the clips into Premiere. Looking over the shots, I came up with the idea pretty easily. I knew it was gonna take some After Effects work. I also knew that with what I wanted to do with the sound I would need to use Pro Tools. The footage had no sound, which is fine - I would've probably dumped it anyway. I dropped in the music to make sure everything was synced up how I wanted. To get the song right I had to chop it up in a couple places, but Ave Maria is pretty forgiving when it comes to editing, as it turns out. As soon as I had the edit how I wanted I exported the video and an OMF and moved to Pro Tools - my sweet, sweet Pro Tools.

I started out by making markers at each gunshot, to save me time in the future - which was a good idea. Next I went about finding my gunshots, which was made really easy thanks to Still North Media's Firearm SFX Library, a library I backed on Kickstarter years ago and is still paying dividends. It's free so check it out if you like sounds. I grabbed a couple handfuls of clips that had the tone I was looking for, chopped 'em up and spaced them out about where they needed to be. Fun fact, most of the gunshots are shotguns with a couple rifles. I wanted the shots to have more "boom" than "crack". After putting the gunshots in their general place, I looked for some gun foley sounds. Loading mags, racking the slide, and miscellaneous handling noise all found they're way onto the timeline. Once I had the gun handling at the beginning done, I focused on the gunshots. For every shot I also wanted to include the sound of the slide, just for some added texture. I synced the shots up to the video easily enough and moved on to phase two.

I bussed(sent) all the gunshot tracks into an aux input track, added reverb and made it juuuuust right. I did the same for the foley sounds which included all the slide clips. After all the reverb was good, I set to mixing the sound effects with music. I made sure every shot/foley was as loud as it seemed it would be on screen, depending on how far away the camera was and where the gun was. Once that was done, I bussed the "reverb" aux faders into two second aux faders to have easy control over the total volume of the tracks. And since the shots and the foley was on separate faders it was easy to lower the shots for the "flashback" part of the video. With everything mixed I watched the video through a billion times and almost cried with joy. Lastly, I added in some bird sounds just to give the beginning and end some ambience. I bounced the tracks and sent them to Premiere. Once there, I grabbed the video clip that needed VFX and sent it to (dun dun dun) After Effects.

This was a really simple idea that I made really complicated. I actually started, though, by making things easier for myself. I hit "Track Camera" within AE and it actually made a perfect 3D camera that matched what Andrew did on set, I was shocked. This made placing the thought bubble and text really easy. But of course nothing can be easy, and I put the bubble slightly behind me so that it had a bit of foreground interaction. I started by rotoscoping my hat by hand, but then I had the thought "Hey maybe the Roto Brush will work well for this shot" - a thought my VFX professor told us to never have. And while the Roto Brush was very precise, it was slow going. Probably faster than what I could do by hand, but who knows? Things were looking good, but I decided that this wasn't enough. I wanted the thought bubble to have a more unique and interesting look. So I spent about an hour trying to find the perfect look, and while I'm not completely happy with it, I think it looks fine. And after that things were looking even better than before, and then I thought "Hey wouldn't it be funny if I never blinked my eyes in this shot?" Another bad thought. I spent about an hour doing each blink - and you'll notice in the finished video, I blink. It looked okay. Not good enough for me to let it go through though. There were some finishing touches on my roto-work and then I rendered and sent the clip back to Premiere. After a quick color grade I exported the final product.

And that's that. I hope you at least somewhat enjoyed that write up on my WORKFLOW. I had a really good time doing the sound and a good time editing the video and an alright time doing the VFX.

I really stepped it up on the content this week. In my opinion.

Peace.