Following on from the shoot I decided that I would have to plan the workflow of the project to meet the deadline. There were countless tricky elements to the project and I would need to manage not only my time but get a grip on the "process" I was going to use to create the piece. I have been developing my skill level with Adobe After Effects and realise the complexity of the software. It is incredibly powerful BUT you MUST have a plan heading into it as there are lots of elements that I am going to have to bring together as there will be lots of layers, techniques and effects needed both audio and visual and synching all of the elements would also be important. To this end this was my workflow plan which was developed through trial and error from earlier versions of the Amen Piece and from the tests on the final process I was using..
1: Edit the music videos together. This is for both audio and visual. The audio is the flow of the place and obviously this needs to work seamlessly. The visuals from these need to be in synch. This would be done in Premiere Pro. This was learnt from earlier versions of Amen and trial and error here to develop this as the first priority.
2:Editing video in After Effects for timings is a nightmare from tests as rendering is constant and getting timings is tricky. So the next step is to create a second visual track of the drumming footage synching it to the first track created especially the audio. The issue here is timing the drummer studio shoot footage to the drum beats of the songs. The BPM of the original Amen Break is 136. However all of the tracks by the artists vary hugely from over 140 BPM to about 90 BPM. SO in order for the drum footage of 136 BPM to work with the drum beat on a music video that was 90 BPM I would have to slow it down. I found the easiest way to do this was to follow the drums of the first bar of the Amen Brother drums using the wave-form and select these. Then find a bar of the Amen drums in the song that had used them and do the same. Putting these into the timeline it gave the options to manipulate the incoming clip to make it the same length as the clip in the timeline. This got close and slowed the clip down or sped it up as necessary so the drummer, drummed in time with the clip. It was very awkward and trial and error but did get there in the end. Again this is a techniqued developed through trial and error on earlier versions of this piece
3: Make sure consider music video to be placed under the to be chroma-keyed track would work well with the drummer footage that would go over the top. 4:3 ratio music video footage would work best with a drummer shot composition that would be sympathetic to this ratio. I did this by putting the drummer footage over the top of the music video footage and the making it partially transparent to see how it would work. See example below. This way of doing things (4-7 below also) evolved from my test piece getting to grips with the process with the Bowie and Oasis clip.
4: Similar to the above but on the screens that need type on the screen to make sure that the shot composition was such to allow room for this. For this I made a crib sheet to try and organise this. It was also useful for point 5 below.
5: Again similar to the two above but this time to make sure that the shots were varied and interesting and that a MS did not follow a MS.
6: These tracks could then be exported as a track that had the music and all of the music video clips on it. Also another track that had the drummer footage on it. These needed to be exactly the same length and both absolutely in synch.
7: Import these into After Effects. The aim was that for ease and synching the music video track could go in as a bottom layer in the timeline as the master to keep in synch with. Then the drummer layer would go over the top. These layers could then each be duplicated for ever song knowing that you could then crop only the elements that you needed for each track (drummer and music video) and they would be in synch. these could then be manipulated in After Effects and the effects and keying done.
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