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.

Week 7: Record a Podcast - Bog Tawk

Sorry for the absence, I was shooting things late Tuesday and Wednesday and need time to both do those things and recover from them. But onto the activity.

While I was down in Newberg for the shoots, I hit up Victor about recording a podcast. As I didn't have the time or equipment down there, we recorded via the web yesterday. Victor recorded in a coffee shop and they refused to listen to my demands of utter silence while we recorded, so that's all the noise in the background. There's a lot more from this recording session, some of which is good, some of which is quite bad. They may end up seeing the light of day at a later point. Victor and I also discussed some neat ideas that we may collab on later. So look forward to that maybe if it happens, also you don't know what it is so you can't really look forward to it.

Buh, enjoy:

Week 6 - Shoot Anything and Edit It - Juniors Abroad 2K15

This one is a bit of a cheat. I shot all of the footage two years ago and had it half edited already. But I thought it was time that I get around to finishing it. But hey, if I didn't cheat this week, you wouldn't have gotten anything.

After every spring semester my alma mater (lmao wut) gives the opportunity for Juniors to go on one of a handful of trips abroad. I chose to go on the "Seville, Spain to London, England" trip with four of my friends and a bunch of randos who we eventually befriended. It was a really good time full of good memories. This vid gives me fuzzy feelings. I hope you like it.

The style of edit I chose was pretty much dictated by a couple things. 1) I knew I wanted to use the song "Americans Abroad" by Against Me, cause duh; 2) I had over 300 clips, and if I wanted to give each of them a spotlight the video would be like a half hour long. So I made this thing choppy as all get out. The second song/half of the video came from needing to make the video longer, and also giving it a more personal touch. In my old age I've gotten soft. Anyway, maybe some day I'll make a longer style video? But seeing as it took me a year and a half to even get this five minute video out, I wouldn't hold my breath.

I could probably do several posts recounting the memories of this trip. And hey maybe I will. Also, we spent like five days in London but I got lazy and stopped filming everything. Which is a bummer cause London was a good time.

I'll go ahead and dedicate this post to the boys. <3

Week 4: Everybody is John - Final Edits/Effects

Whew.

Finally finished. This one would've been posted on time, but yet again Pro Tools is just the worst. But here it is! A total of three hours of recording edited down to a breezy hour and fifteen, with a handful of sound effects added in. So be forewarned, this is an hour and fifteen minutes long.

(Regular ole' link)

A year ago, I recorded this with my friends John, Joseph, Austin, and Victor. I always meant to get around to it, so here it is. I'm pretty happy with this. It was relatively easy to edit everything together, it took a bit of finessing, but I am good at sound. Most of my time on this was just listening to everything and cutting out the extraneous/not relevant/not funny parts and then finding ways to join the good parts together. I did an okay job, you can here several cuts, but I did my best and also had to work in Premiere which limited my options. All of the sound effects were stuff I had in my now massive sound library, which I'm fine with. It gave me an eency bit of experience working with my library and putting things together.

Overall I'm really happy with this, and am done listening to it for a long time. I have an additional hour of recording where we talk about the rules that I could go through later too as a supplement to this, but BUUUUUUUUH.

So please, enjoy our game of "Everybody Is John".

Also one of these days I'm gonna have to devote an entire activity to trying to fix Pro Tools...

Week 3: Everyone is John - Editing

Hey everyone, quick update on my last activity of the week, which I last described as a mix of "record a podcast" and "radio play". I'm currently in the midst of editing this thing down, but there is a lot more than I thought, so if I want to do this thing as well as it deserves, I need more time. Luckily I run this ship, baby, I make the rules. So here's what I'm gonna do: I'm gonna make this activity one of my rolls for next week so that I can continue. I'll do it as my first activity of Week 4 and have it up on Tuesday. I feel like this is totally fair, and may end up happening in the future - because often my ambition outweighs my ability. And rather than just rushing things and turning them in "on time" I want to be a good boy. So I'll mention all of this in tomorrows Wrap Up post.

In the meantime, and as a way to "prove" that I'm actually working on this, enjoy this screenshot.

Yeah. I'm doing all of my editing - the actual chopping up of the clips - in Premiere just because that kind of thing is easier for me than in Pro Tools. Also, I'm pretty sure my Pro Tools is still borked and I don't wanna deal with that.

THIS IS NOT A COP OUT.

Edit:

Quick update four hours after initial posting, I finished the actual editing, or at least 98% of it.

There will be fine tuning/massaging but I got our three hours of recording down to an hour and fifteen minutes.

Week 2: Work on Jonesy and the Big Chap - Storyboards 1

Jonesy and the Big Chap was an assignment I made last year for my VFX class. I was really proud of it - still am - but I always wanted there to be more than just the one scene. So that's what this activity is meant to be, time for me to work on a little "passion project". But as it is an animation, I need to do a lot of pre production before I get to actually animate. I need to figure out how I want to tell the story, research the scenes I want to do, storyboard, make the characters, rig the characters, design the sets. I decided to start with storyboarding, which was a bad idea. Because storyboarding is where I have to decide a lot of stuff - including story points and set design, both of which are really important. But now I know.

So I didn't get a lot of shots mapped out, because I basically immediately realized that I need to do more work before I get to boards, but here's what I got.

I was really happy with my first frames and then I had to draw the cat and I remembered that I suck at drawing. Look at his face, wtf is with his face?

It was at this point that I realized that I need to do more decision making. Obviously this isn't a lot to present to you. So I'm gonna post my boards for the original short to feel better about myself. Prepare for some bare minimum drawing talent though.

Sooooo yeah. Sorry this post is late, I was busy last night being an actor. My wrap-up post will be up later tonight too.

Week 1: Music Video Without Music - Sober

Finally.

Pro Tools really tried my patience with this one. I wager I had to restart Pro Tools once every fifteen minutes if I was lucky, and every 5 minutes if I wasn't. It didn't help that I put most of this off until today. But I'm pretty happy with what I came up with. The music video is Sober by Childish Gambino, an artist I haven't listened to lately but this video popped into my head almost instantly when trying to come up with a good MVWM.



I guess I should reflect on this project or something. I'd say the hardest part, besides constant crashing, was finding all the sounds I needed in my own house. The squeaking chairs is a squeaky part of our floor,  the footsteps were made by dragging my microphone to the bathroom and setting up a mirror so I could see my computer around the corner. I tried for a long time to get the right sound for him smiling, which was just me sitting in front of the mic doing weird stuff with my mouth. Oh god, and the cracking wrists, that was me cracking my fingers and then Lauren when mine would no longer crack. You're lucky I turned that down, cause when it was at the recorded volume it was disgusting. I'm really happy with how his footsteps turned out, the squeak of the shoes came from, can you guess, a pair of shoes I have that are incredibly squeaky. Lot of squeaks in this.

I only did just under a minute and a half of the video, which proved to be a pretty good length for me to tackle. Despite Pro Tools constantly fighting me, I had a pretty good time getting back into working with sound. But boy, do I need to figure out how to fix this garbage software.

Am I a good boy yet.