Making the Music Video: No Comfort in the Void (Part 03) - Post

Onto talking about my favourite part of the video production process - post production! Let me show you what I'm doing to finish my "No Comfort In the Void" Music video.

Video Transcript:
Hello! I am the artist known as DEROSNEC, and welcome to my weekly vlog where I talk about making music, art, movies, and more.

Last week I showed you all the behind the scenes footage from shooting my “No Comfort In the Void” music video. This week we’re going to start putting it all together!

Before I start editing, I like to make sure I have all my assets ready to go. Which means that I have a bit of drawing that I need to do.

Drawing

Here I have my iPad pro and Apple pencil, which I’m going to use to draw the Vitruvian Human parts.

One of my favourite things about the app I’m using to draw (which is called Procreate), is that it takes a video of your drawing as you draw. If you’ve been with me a while you’ve probably seen me post some of these process videos. Anyway, I’m going to use this to my advantage in the actual music video - as I’d like to have the “draw on” effect. So, hopefully it captures everything cleanly and this will work!

OK! My drawing is complete and now I can load everything in.

Getting Organized

For this particular video I’ll be editing in Adobe Premiere so that I can use the round trip to After Effects feature. As I’ve mentioned in previous videos, being able to round trip to an FX program directly from my editing program is huge timesaver.

As you can see, I’ve organized my project so that it’s easy to find exactly what I’m looking for. Because I shot the video out of order, I’ve got my shotlist pulled up so I can cross reference which shots were shot when. I’ve also got my video story outline so that I have the bigger picture easily accessible.

I also asked Maxwell in Chicago to film himself so that he could be in the video, too! So I’ve got all his footage here, ready to go as well.

Syncing to the Song

Now I can start the arduous task of syncing everything so that I can go through and find the best takes. On a regular shoot with a crew, this wouldn’t be so bad, but because I shot everything by myself, I had to do things in a certain way to make sure that I was keeping on track. For example, I’d have to start the audio playback loop before I press record on the camera, which means there’s no clean “in”. It also means that I probably ended up doing way more takes than I typically would need when trying to perform. Getting in and out of character and trying to also coordinate all the things I have to do in between each shot (like playing back audio, adjusting the camera, making sure I’m in focus, pressing record.. etc), is very taxing, but obviously I want to give the best and most convincing performance that I can, so that means leaving the loop running a bit longer.

Editing

Once I’m all synced up, I can start watching takes and making selects. This part is pretty boring to watch if you’re not the editor, but I’ll try to give you an idea of what I look for when I’m making these selections.

For me, editing is mostly feeling. While you do have to pay attention to the visuals and the placements on screen, a lot of times you can adjust that. What you can’t adjust is the raw feeling or the performance. Granted, it’s much much harder to judge your own performance than someone else’s - I for one am pretty harsh on myself. But regardless, feeling your way through the performances is going to be your best bet when it comes to knowing which is the “right” take.

Art is about storytelling, and conveying emotion. This particular music video is all about emotion, so it’s important that I get strong feelings from the performances. I’ll take all the best performances, then weave them together with the other visuals that I’ve made to tell the story in the most entertaining and beautiful way that I can manage with what I’ve got.

FX And Finishing

Colour plays a huge part in the story of this video, so I wanted it to be mostly black and white with specific, isolated, and extra bright colours. This means I have a lot of post processing that I’ll need to do, but that’s why I picked Premiere for this project. Unfortunately, my EX3 is not the best camera to do stuff like this with, as it just doesn’t have the technical capability. But I do the best I can with what I’ve got, because it’s all I’ve got, and if I don’t create stuff I’ll go nuts.

So there’s my process of everything that happens after shooting on this particular music video. Is there anything that you’re really curious about that I didn’t cover in this series? Ask away in the comments!

Stay tuned for the final video, and if you haven’t checked out Everson Poe’s album “The Body Is Not Sacred” yet, then go do that right now!

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NOTE: These Thursday Vlog transcripts can also be found published on my website: http://derosnec.com