At the moment, me and fellow classmate Amanda Nilsson are working on finalizing our first animated short. We’re working in Adobe Animate (Flash) and are pretty much done. Our first film will clock in at just under a minute a features a drunk, miserable rabbit-like creature named “Dutzie“.
We’re both huge film nerds and want to make sure every detail is just right, so of course we needed a bumper for our made up film company ‘Bad Apple Films’. We didn’t really want a flashy logo for this one so we decided on shooting something in the studio.
Here’s what we did:
Boiled an apple for about 2 hours.
Set up a hard light on a phototable.
Put a mark on the table where we wanted the apple to hit (later masked out).
Set the focus on the apple on the mark on the table.
Filmed the impact of the apple as we dropped it from a ladder.
Focus shift.
Imported our footage into Premiere and put the text in (font: Keep Calm)
Added camera blur to the text and keyframed to match the real focus shift.
Added grain, filmscans and some sound effects.
Job done.
It’s tempting to just put a clean bumper / logo together digitally, but I highly recommend getting some unique footage because it’s way more fun. And you’ll end up with something different. And different is good. There’s a million things you can do, no matter what theme you’re going for. Blow stuff up, make a time-lapse or paint some bananas – only rule is; don’t be boring.
A while back I shot a video for Magdalena Wolk’s song “Tuscan tragic”. We wanted to do something quick and simple, so adding some sort of flair to the visuals was essential. Shooting a quick video is a great way to give a song you want to put out that extra push. Here’s how we did it.
We had access to a photostudio with a white backdrop so being able to control the lights was a big plus. I also have an old VGA-projector laying around so we decided to project pre-shot footage onto Magdalena and the white background, while she was performing. Doing this instead of adding footage with a blending mode/opacity change gives you more interesting footage since the projector emits a ray of light, hitting the moving subject in various angles, adding lights and darks. And life.
Magdalena had some great random footage from her travels, some of it shot with a cameraphone. For our project, this worked great since we knew we wanted a natural and heavily mishandled look. Both me and Magdalena are huge fans of vintage footage, so coming up with the different aspects of this video wasn’t really that hard. We mixed Magdalena’s footage with my ink in water footage and edited it together with the full audiotrack as a base.
We did add one more effect to this video, found in the chorus. Magdalena moves in slow motion, but her lips are in sync with the words. How? Performing at double speed while shooting at 60 fps. We shoot the chorus separately, with Magdalena performing to a audiotrack running at double speed. When you bring your footage into your editor (Premiere Pro in my case), all you have to do is change the speed/duration of the clip down to 50% (half the speed of your track running at double speed – duh) – and you’re in sync with the original audio again.
Now – I did have some problems using clips shot at different framerates (the rest of the video is shot in standard 24fps) in the same sequence, so I had to edit together the chorus in a project of it’s own, and then export it at 24 fps. After this, it worked fine.
I did some research and found out that the optimal convertion would be to bring footage shot at 60 fps down to 40% when changing the speed of your clip, if your video is meant to be exported at 24 fps. This because 60 X 40 = 2400. I’m sure there’s lots of information about this elsewhere – but it might be worth testing if you’re planning to try out this effect. Of course, your audio will need to run at a matching speed when shooting.
The wind in the slowmotion footage comes from a leafblower I bought at a yardsale for about $20. The dust and scratches are real filmscans, (most of them come from this brilliant place called filmlooks) which I put on top of my footage using the screen and overlay blending modes in Premiere. Finally, I added a transparent .psd layer with Super16-borders to sell the look a bit more. We shot this video in about three hours. So I’m quite excited to see what we can pull of when we add some more time and planning next time. Make sure to check out Magdalena’s other stuff if you liked this video, since she’s easily found on Soundcloud, YouTube and Spotify.
Got questions about the process? You know where to put them. Full video below.
Here’s some of the footage I wrote about in my previous ink in water post. I did some tweaking in Premiere Pro with the levels, and made a upside down version in black and white as well.
If you find any use for this type of stuff feel free to download it and use it however you see fit (there’s a download option if you watch the videos on Vimeo). Should work fine as top layers if you play around with the blending modes. In case you’re wondering what I’m on about here just watch this tutorial.
If you do happen to use this footage send me a link so I can check it out just for kicks.
