Leaning how to use After Effects

Why are we using After effects?

For the chorus of our music video, our artist was filmed in
front of a green screen so that we have a variety of shots, and also colourful surreal backgrounds are commonly used in house and dubstep music videos, and we can achieve this by using a green screen and editing it on after effects.

 How to edit the green screen / use after effects:

Since we already had our footage of our artists performance in front of the green screen all we had to do was edit it, and to do this you use after effects which is a post production editing software which works alongside final cut pro.

1. Firstly, you must cut the section of the clip you are planning to use to edit, because if you edit the whole clip, when it comes to rendering it, it will take a long time.2

2. When you know the clip you are using, you must click on the clip on the timeline in final cut pro, right click and there will be an option to replace it in after effects composition and from there it will open a tab in after effects which will allows you to start editing it.

3. Before can edit the background, you must get rid of the green background of the green screen. To do this you must click on the 'keylight' option, and then choose the 'screen colour' option and choose the colour picker to change the colour of the background, you must choose a similar bright green colour so that it will cancel out the original green background of the green screen, and turn the background black, (by doing this you are completely removing the green and making it possible to replace it with any other colour)

4. lastly, you click on the 'layer tab' and then choose 'solid' (or however you want your background to be, in our case we wanted a solid colour), in which we where able to change our background to any colour we wanted. You must drag the original video of the artist above the colour layer tab on the timeline on after effects so that you can see the artist above the background.
 we chose a pink colour because it was bright and vibrant like the house music theme, it contrasted well with the rest of the video and also it is the main colour when it comes to our artists final ancillary work.

Evaluation of 3/12 editing by atiyah

3/12/2015

Today we didn't have a lesson, however we came in to complete and clean up our music video as we are coming towards the deadline date.

we cleaned up the clips by trimming them, getting rid of any gaps in the video, completing the chorus by inserting the finalized edited green screen, and inserting the other clips into the chorus and syncing them correctly.

We also corrected the issues with our video, such as the 2nd verse being out of sync, and some clips moving too quickly and being wrongly arranged.

Our aim for the final editing lesson, which is 4/12 is to add any final effects to the video, and run through it one more time to make sure it is clean cut.

Extension - Frustration with swing location. (By Amy)

This is a image I had taken when I visited the location of Kings Cross that we have used heavily throughout our music video. However, originally we planned to use this swing as a main focus in our video but the lights were not on the swing the three times we visited as a group to film. I am unaware of the reasons why and consequently it did not fit our theme of using colourful lights as a concept in our video. Therefore we decided to use less shots of the swing location in our video.

 

 

Leaving Kings Cross station on the 2nd of December left me in disbelief as when I left the station I could see the bright lights from the swing. It was frustrating to see as it looks beautiful and it would have looked effective in our video and it happens to be working as the deadline is near.

Extension - Thursday 3rd December editing. (By Amy)

 

These are pictures I had taken during our editing session. This editing session was successful as we managed to complete the chorus which included the green screen. We had difficulties editing to begin with because the green screen footage was rendering and this takes a long period of time. Matching shots to the chorus was therefore a difficult task because the footage would crash and wouldn't play properly. When the green screen had completed rendering, we matched the shots and the sequence of shots began to piece together. Other groups within the editing suite were giving us positive feedback and were complimenting how the video was visually interesting and creative. The shots of the dancing made them laugh and smile.

 

The editing session in total took us four hours and it became stressful but we worked to the best of our abilities. Our song has a repetitive lyric 'Just gonna get knocked back' and this is repeated in total 13 times but twice within the song. We struggled to find enough footage to last each line and so added in more dancing shots as it was a performance video alongside a narrative. We managed to complete the music video but we will have to add effects in our final editing session to make sure we are definitely happy and pleased with our music video.

 

Extension - Tuesday 1st December editing.

Images of our editing session.

 

 

Atiyah editing;

 

Amy editing;

 

These are images of me and Atiyah in which we managed to complete the whole of the first verse with a variety of shots including the base tracks and discontinuous editing. We also looked over the footage of the green screen and planned how we were going to edit and what effects to include in our music video. We still have to complete the second verse and edit the green screen but all in all are feeling positive about completing the music video early. The editing session in total took two and a half hours but we plan to spend even longer editing on Wednesday and Thursday.

Rough cut edit of Green Screen.

Changed the background to a suttle pink colour.
Used different texts for each of the text that comes of the screen.

Using after affects help me create the type of scene I wanted for the music video.
I created text and put it on top of the image because we decided as a group that it would relate with the HOUSE genre, we used our creative minds to think about how we want to diffrentiate our video from others.


It wasnt as long as putting affects in but it did take up a whole lesson doing four green screen edits and trying to also be consistant.

Evaluation of 2/12/15 (by atiyah)

 

2/12/15 Evaluation

Although only two members of the group was in for the media lesson, everyone in the group contributed to improving the video throughout the day.

Amy synced majority of the clips in the correct order, and chose the clips we would be using for the second verse of the music video.

Destinni helped set up the after effects software for the green screen and explained to me(Atiyah) how to use it properly since I had basic knowledge of after effects (until this day).

The lesson consisted of Monica and me editing the green screen and choosing the font, composition, size and colour of the texts on the green screen and the colour of the background.

Our aim next lesson is to arrange the edited section of the green screen properly into the chorus of the music video, and to start completing the cleaning up the music video in general