The Post-Production Diary

To put together our music video, we worked in Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects. First we started with organising all the raw footage into folders both on an external hard drive (to avoid space issues) and in Premiere Pro. The most effective sorting for us was by scene. We used the storyboard to pick out the key parts of the video and, having accordingly named each video by scene and take, placed them into folders in order to edit later.

One of the first steps was to add the music track into the timeline to allow us to organise videos to the beat. I had previously edited the music track to cut down the length of the song and to create a bridge (as the song did not have one and we wanted to include a build up part before the final chorus). You can hear the original version of the song here which had two choruses instead of one at the end of the song that were cut:

When filming, I also created a 1.5x speed version of the song as we wanted to have a lip sync playback effect in the music video. This meant I had to lip sync faster and we needed to slow down the video footage and use a normal speed version of the edited song. Therefore, one of our first steps was to figure out how much slower the videos needed to be (which were filmed at a higher frame rate of 60fps to have smoother slow motion). According to some magical maths by Amy, dividing 100 by 1.5 got the speed of 66% which matched the song speed. (You'd be surprised how long this took us to figure out; I cannot tell you how useless I am at basic maths). 

After this, using the storyboard, we worked on adding the videos in their correct places, leaving effects until after. We focused on perfecting lip sync timing and having a variety of visuals as well as a cohesive, progressing storyline as sorted in the storyboard.

We also added in a basic version of the titles in the places where we wanted graphics to be added alongside video effects. 

After all the videos were sorted, I took the Premiere Pro file home in order to work in the CC version of the programme instead of CS6. This was because more effects were available on the updated version and I wanted to work with a wide range of graphics. This meant converting between the two versions, shown below, and manually re-adding keyframes for the effects as they do not convert between versions.

After all the visual and audio effects were put in place, some listed below such as VHS tape glitching and sound, this turned into our rough cut version. It did not have perfected lip syncing, all the effects or graphic titles and, according to feedback received, was too long but we were ready to work on improvements after the viewing.

Above you can see the completed timeline of our rough cut. Originally, our rough cut had an intro and outro narrative aspect which added about 45 seconds to our completed video. After feedback, we decided our narrative made sense without these parts, and as much as it was painful to 'kill our darlings' (especially because they contained video which required us to drag out a massive old tv across school, film in -7 degree weather in only a light dress and more) but we felt the video worked best without those parts.

Once these bits were cut, we began working on the final cut. This required to use After Effects to make titles. We used a tutorial to animate a neon blinking sign for the OUTLEX logo and ANGEL ON FIRE title. This was then linked into Premiere Pro and placed in the start of the timeline.

Once the final effects were added in, including the graphic title, we double checked the lip syncing and left the project to render all the effects.

Once completed, we formatted to H.264 1080p YouTube compatible format and exported our completed video. This was then uploaded onto the OUTLEX YouTube and whilst processing, we created our own thumbnails, and you can see mine below:

And so, the post-production process was complete after several weeks of hard work!