AMEN: POST-PRODUCTION TESTS

Before starting post production I did some tests with the footage to see what would be the best way of doing things before I launched myself into it. I had tested all of the techniques independently but not with all of the elements I had created through to a final version and composition so I decided to do this and learn the lesson. I spent an afternoon playing around with the following areas that I had concerns over and came to some conclusions moving forward.

Slow-mo & Speed
Worked OK but effect was limited as not true slow-mo just doubling, or trebling to create a staggered version of the action not a flowing. The idea of doing ALL slow-mo throughout was to make it easier to synch the drum tempos of all of the tracks BUT it just did not look right (see below). The emphasis of getting the drummers tempo matching the tracks being played made the footage work and was absolutely necessary. This could be adjusted in PremierePro and sometimes meant it was a little slow-mo but at others times the footage needed to be sped up.


AMEN DRUMMER SLO MO TESTS from Jon Saward on Vimeo.


Layouts & Composition
I played around with a few ideas and mocked some up in After Effects but even though I liked trying a few elements on the screen and did try to include the album covers and musical notes playing it was simply too much. I had already decided to scale it down to only the most basic elements. 1: Silhouette of drummer. 2 music video footage playing within the silhouette. 3: The exposition type on the screen. Everything else simply clutters and confused the message.

Processes & Editing Work-flow 
I needed to work out the quickest, simplest and most effective way of editing, compositing and creating the piece using Premiere Pro and After Effects. I did try to do it all in After effects but whilst great for compositing and motion graphics is a bit of a blunt instrument as far as editing video went especially synching to sound. To this end I decided to edit the audio, drummer footage AND the music video tracks in Premiere Pro as this was the simplest way and I am really happy in this software. Then I exported these as three individual tracks of exactly the same length to enable easy synching in After Effects as long as I got this bang on in Premiere. Then in After effects I could chop up these tracks, synching them to the master track and do the compositing.