Test Shoot- Editing Treatment

By Fern Disney
Original shoot Raw edit:

One of our ideas will be to include short clips of London streets at night, capturing different people walking past and just the different lights. When Megan went out one night, I asked her to film a short clip whilst in a taxi on the way to her going out. She got around 4 minutes worth, however this is the stripped back version, including short clips, roughly around the size we will use in our actual music video. Yet they will not all be together as we are not doing a continuous narrative/ storyline. Just for the vision concept of a test shoot, I decided to put them all together purely for an example. I then started to play around on the editing treatments as a way to test what I can use when it comes to editing our final music video, below are just two of the examples which I came across, as you can tell in the raw edit, it was hand held, thus making it very shaky when the car moved and also very dark as it was shot at night. 

Test Shoot- Speed change and lighting: 

A way I decided to try edit the test shoot way by making the clips slower, with it being filmed within a car, the shots were very sensitive to the movement as the taxi was going fast enough to make the clips to quick. Therefore I made each clip around 60% speed instead, which resulted in this effect. As a whole I think when we come to the creation of our final music video project, most of the shots will be slowed down as I believe this would fit better with the speed and style of the music which we will be using. However, as you can tell in this shoot, making it slower, made it much more blurrier. A way we can therefore work around this would be to use a DSLR camera instead or, to film whilst we were on the streets ourselves instead of being in a car- thus steading the frame. Another aspect which I decided to manipulate was the lighting, as shown in the original raw edit, the lighting of the clips were quite dark and you aren't able to see as well what is going on. Therefore I used the lighting effects tool under Video Effect~ Adjust. 

When dragging this onto the video clip, I found this created a spotlight effect in the corner of the clip, which isn't what I wanted. So I then double clicked on the clip and the effects I had added to this clip opened up in the top left hand corner, I could then scroll down to the Lighting Effects which I had added and go to "Light 1" and where it originally said spotlight, I changed it to Directional which opened up the lighting across the whole frame and clip. 

I found the change in lighting quite successful as it made my frames much more visible, however, when I come to editing the final piece, I will only lightly use the lighting effect, so it makes a difference by doesn't make it as grainy as it does in this test shoot.

Test Shoot- Warp Stabiliser:

Another effect which I decided to experiment with was the "Warp Stabiliser" under Distort. 

The effect makes hand held video clips appear to be shot of a tripod, it make it much more still. However, in certain clips shown above, it zooms in the frame to make it appear less shaky, however, I do not think that appears successful as it zooms in, cropping out a lot of the frame. Even though this did result in my clips being much more still, I was unable to adjust the speed alongside with using this effect, which means if I end up using this effect, my clips will have to be the natural speed and because this was filmed inside a car I believe it is too quick and wouldn't fit in with the rest of the clips. Therefore a way to over come this, would be to film outside of the car, whilst walking on the streets, therefore I can use this tool and the speed would fit in normally.

Overall, I believe this test shoot was really useful and helpful in showing me different ways to edit my shoots when it comes to it. Even though I did experiment with other adjustments such as contrast and levels, I decided not to make a whole new video for each because the change was only slight. Another way this shoot was successful was because it showed me way around the problems which was encountered. It was very shaky~ I can use warp Stabiliser/ not film in the car. I could film on a DSLR camera instead, however if I were to do this in the location of London on the streets at night with a tripod, there would be a higher risk of people around me conforming/ knowing they are being filmed and therefore their behaviour would change and my camera being broken or stolen.

Smoking shoot