#experimental sequence

After having created a short example of what our final ‘Satan Said Dance’ music video could have looked at, seen below, we decided that it would be an appropriate step to revise our song short-list in order to detirmine whether or not we had a song that we could use to create a backup idea, as both Julia and I had expressed serious concerns regarding the relationship between the song and the visuals, regarding thought beats, disjunture, narrative and a range of other aspects.

As a result of this decision, we singled out the song ‘Amenamy’ by Purity Ring as a strong song for a secondary idea. We made the decision to create this short sequence, showing the footage we had filmed to project, edited using thought beats into a simple example of how many of our ‘Satan Said Dance’ ideas could be applicable to the song ‘Amenamy.’ We chose to only use this footage as we felt there was a stronger relationship between the style, colour and connotations of the footage and specifically the sound of the song.

Post Production: Experimental Sequence to Project

This is the final sequence that Julia and I have created of the experimental footage that we filmed previously. We took the most successful shots of all the shots that we filmed and opened them up into Preimere Pro. We were not too concerned with the order of shots, the length of shots or the length of the overall sequence, because the sequence is going to be used to project. There were a few simple steps that we took to create the sequence using Preimere Pro.

Firstly, we started a new project and imported the selected footage into Premiere Pro. Secondly, we dragged the footage piece by piece onto the timeline. Though we were not too concerned with the order of the footage, we did attempt to order the footage so that we avoided consistency. For example, we did not want to open with all of the lava lamp footage, then continue with ink footage. Instead, we wanted consistent ‘randomness’, meaning we wanted the entire sequence to change in colour, movement and subject throughout. Once we had done this, the first thing we needed to do was crop all of the footage, one by one. Some pieces needed to be cropped because of the build-up of dark dye at the bottom of the tank and the reflections that caused, other pieces needed to be cropped because the sides of the tank were visible, detracting from the shot, and others were cropped because Julia and I had noticed a particularly successful but small feature of a shot, and wanted that aspect to be the main subject. For example, the gif below is of a piece of footage that was cropped so that the focus of the shot is the spinning blue and yellow ink. Once we had completed this, cropping all of the footage to the correct size, omitting aspects of each shot we did not want, we had the beginnings of a successful sequence.

Above: Cropped Footage

Next, we went through the sequence, shot by shot, and increased the speed by right clicking on a shot and selecting the ‘speed/duration’ option. From there we increased the speed to roughly 250% for each clip, though this percentage varied somewhat according to how fast the dye was moving in the original clips. We had to be careful not to speed the shots up too much because we are aware that they will be projected onto us, re-filmed and then sped up even more so. We do not want the ink to be moving too fast in the final shots and have thus had to carefully estimate the speed of this sequence. On some shots, we selected the ‘reverse speed’ option, which flips the frames in a shot, consequentially making things appear backwards. We did this for shots that were particularly interesting regarding movement, meaning that we have much more surreal, aesthetic and overall enticing shots to project.

Above: Speed/Duration and Reverse Speed Option

The next thing we did to the footage was to flip some shots upside down. This worked especially well on reversed clips as the movement is the focus of the shot, but it is obscured and thus becomes must more surreal in tone and overall appears more experimental.

Finally we completed the most imperative and challenging process in the creation of this sequence; we corrected the colours of the background, striving to correct the background to white without affecting the colour of the dye too much. We also attempted to use colour correction to remove reflections. This was the hardest aspect of the creation of this sequence, as we relied on many different tools, including the Contrast Tool, Change Colour Tool and the RGB Curves tool. Each shot required different settings on these tools to achieve the best possible colour correction, though on reflection I feel we could have sacrificed some of the colour correction because it has resulted in dye that, in some shorts, appears completely artificial. We are relying on the aesthetic of the projection footage - including the fact that the projection footage filmed previously appeared to capture the actual projected footage in bad quality, creating an aged and thus somewhat dark tone - to complement the often artificial aesthetic of the dye in this sequence.

Above: RGB Curves Option

Above: Experimental Sequence, Below: Updated Music Video Idea

Above is the final result of the experimental sequence that we began previously. We are incredibly pleased with the result and thus we have updated our music video plan. Below is our updated music video idea, in which we explain more about how we created the sequence, why we like it and how we want to adjust our music video idea based around the successfulness of the experimental sequence. 

Son of nature- Gatan upp och gatan ner