Timeline
Having decided on my theme, as well as having noted how shaky my DSLR footage was, I decided to borrow a DJI Osmo in order to get clean and stable footage for my final video.
I layed out my initial footage, cutting it where I knew I wanted to swap the footage out for After Effects compositions or still frames. As a result, I had a baseline to work from and could take these cuts, edit them to how I want individually, whether that be by importing them to AE for one of the 'filter' shots or just edit each individually.
Having done this, I was able to tackle each part separately, whilst still knowing when and how they fit into the final timeline, having them pre-cut to the exact lengths I wanted them at.
Front-facing Filter
My first 'filter' was a front-facing camera, which I had decided on in order to maintain the idea of a 'vlog' scenario, theming the piece on a person's experience at the stadium. In order to do this, I had a subject in front of a background to key out, looking around at his surroundings, with his arm stretched out to camera-right in order to frame the shot as if he is holding a camera or phone that is facing himself.
After removing the background, I coloured the footage to be more suitable within the scene, opting for a more blue colour temperature, lowering contrast and darkening the image to be more like the low-light condition of the outside scene, compared to the high-key lighting in the green screen studio.
Following the prior scene before switching to this 'filter', I also included a few black frames, a still of the final frame of the footage before-hand and more black frames after to simulate the pause that takes place when switching cameras on most modern phones, just to aid the transition as well as maintain realism within the scene.
Loading Icon
Before transitioning into the 'Snow' and 'NCFC' filters, I added in a 'loading screen' in order to sell the idea that actual processing of the image was taking place, as well as to make the transition from the other shots less jarring.
This was created in Photoshop, by making a Smart Object with a mask to hide a section of a full circle, then using the Timeline feature to create a 29 Frame loop that features the object rotating and exporting as a GIF with transparency enabled. I then inserted this GIF into my Premiere Pro timeline over a black background (with the filter overlay) in order to convey it as a loading screen.
Video URLs for tutorials used or seen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5goYYhneVo
Snow Filter
Following from the 2 CC Particle World generators I had in my concept video, I chose to create more than 10 in the final project, all at varying distances, speeds and sizes (shown here as Black Solids as I create a solid to attach the generator to and copy and pasted to then begin positioning the next). In doing this, it helps sell the idea of the snow being more than just fixed in front of the camera and instead feel more like there is a depth and solidity to each falling flake.
As visible in the timeline screenshot, the generators vary in length and start before the timeline so that it doesn't appear to 'begin' snowing in the scene, rather that is ongoing as I feel that seeing the initial snowflakes, especially when generated like this, would destroy the realism I aimed for when attempting this.
This is just one example of one of the 'background' generators, used to create a depth to the snow. Others were placed very close and at a medium distance to show 3 different, yet connected layers to the snowstorm.
After experimenting, I found that I preferred the look of the 'Twirl' physics for the majority of the snow generators, giving the flakes a more airy flow to them. I used this for most of the generators, while keeping 2 on explosive to give some variance in the movement and dispersal of the snow.
After rendering this out, I was able to substitute the initial timeline footage of the same length in Premiere Pro and move on to the final filter.
Norwich City FC Filter
For this filter I wanted to include the tracked pre-composition from my concept video, some text graphics used to imply a match was being played and hashtags to convey that it is in support of the club and in a real-life scenario could be used to show support for the team.
To show a direct comparison to my concept video, the final version uses the same footage and background image, but I chose to key out the screen differently and implore a more stylised version of the same footage. I also swapped the placeholder text for a more colloquial term that fit better by incorporating football jargon to create a sense of familiarity with the club and those seeing the 'screen'.
My intent when making the tracked object was that it be like an LED screen on the wall, rather than a projection or billboard. To convey this, I chose to have a yellow and green glow from the pre-composition so as to imply it is spilling light onto the scene.
I then went on to track text graphics to various points in the footage, as well as a NCFC badge onto the wall similar to the video pre-composition.
The final part of this 'filter' was more just to add to the scene, rather than be included as a filter object. I included 2 people with a keyed-out background to the scene, incorporating shadows from in-footage light sources as well as the 'LED screen' I had inserted into the scene. I also added a large amount of grain, lowered the overall exposure and decreased saturation in order to help this fit into the scene.
The Graphic Overlay
The final feature I worked on in this production was animating the filter theme. I showed in a prior post how I created the assets and now I can explain how I used them in the timeline.
As discussed, I had 3 separate assets: the grey lines, the hand, and the filter graphics themselves. I start by having the lines and filters slide onto the screen, separately, but at the same time. The way I chose to animate these was to give every movement some 'jitter', by over-shooting it's target destination and going back on itself. Doing this gives a sense of life and personality to the animation rather than having them do purely the bare minimum to convey their movements.
To achieve this, I start by positioning them where they need to be, then move them slightly over, then add a keyframe and move them back further than they should again, but less so than the first, before then adding another keyframe to put them in their correct position. This is done with all three assets, as and when they needed to be moved. The hand icon also includes opacity keyframes for when it needs to appear and disappear, but this is done in the traditional way, without adding extra keyframes to the opacity, only to its movement patterns. All of my keyframe animation is done with the 'Easy Ease' or 'Ease In' temporal interpolation settings in order to give them the most smooth animation possible.
This all combined to leave my final timeline looking like this. The adjustment layer was used to colour the footage initially before exporting to After Effects to do the tracking and particles, which is why it only affects the initial part of the timeline, as I didn't want to double the effects on the later layers. I chose to do it that way as I felt it was easier to pre-colour the scenes for the snow and green-screen elements as I could see exactly how the footage would look in after effects without the need to export or re-import in order to check how the clips looked after being coloured after the fact.
The images on Layers 6 & 7 are the hand icons, separated as I felt this was easier than animating the same one to return to its point of origin each time. The parts between the footage on Layer 3 are the black frames and loading GIFs explained prior.
