In the Process of making and watching video I end up making a lot of what I call Tech Test’s, a lot of short videos that I make purely to work out how someone made something or experimenting with technique and effects. most of the time they don’t progress far or I learn enough from them that they are left in their rough unfinished state, so I thought it would be interesting to see a collection of them in one place.
So now that Spring is finished and live, I am focusing on re-editing and using cut footage with some new stuff to make a short promo specifically for the 2012 Gray’s School of Degree Show.
With two minutes of edit to pull together and a lovely fat capture scratch of existing material I started to plan out my edit, I normally try to plan out an edit so that I can plan for my shoot or if I am using pre-shot material what do I need in terms of additional footage, graphics, music and sound. I liked the matte transitions I made for Spring so I wanted to continue that vibe, the big thing I felt I need to resolve was the title credits.
Having seen another art schools video for their degree show I felt that something a little less graphics based and using a more photographic (or videographic?) style would work well for us. I have been playing with the idea of video portraits for a while and whilst not particularly original I always thought it would be a good exercise, so what better time to try it out and combine it with some matte typography than for this project?
Here is a short test that works as a visual loop
This was a really simple effect to achieve, I made it using Motion although it could easily be done in After Effects, I think I’m the last person I know who likes Motion.
So The type overlaying the portraits is a image mask applied to the next portrait in the edit, so the text becomes more prominent in the areas where the two portraits differ most. So I created the type in Motion but you can use any graphic file or even video as long as it is monotone. once you have your text apply an image mask to the video you want to be the text and use the text as its source, place these over the portrait you want in the background and repeat for the rest of the edit and your done.
A short style test for what I’m thinking for this years Degree show promo film
Last years was the first I had produced and focused on the build of the degree show itself, a fairly straight forward edit of timelapses showing the transformation of the school during the build of the degree show itself.
This year I wanted to add the additional element of showing the school in its normal working day as well as some of the degree build to show more of what goes into the show. I’m thinking that some subtle and classy motion graphic transitions can move the edit on smoothly so that is mostly what this test is for.
So with this in mind I shot some more footage to have some raw material to play with and came up with this short test edit to see how the motion graphic transitions would work as a device for moving the edit forward. The idea being each department will get a short segment, around a minute in length with the graphic shifting the edit to the next department.