Day: March 30, 2019

We wanted our title to be special and something no one had really done before, at least not recently or for an AICE Media Studies project. Being the OG is pretty nice, you know?

We had an idea for the title card for a while and we always wanted it to have something to do with a magnifying glass. This sort of bounced around in different ways. At first we wanted to somehow graphic match cut it to Becca’s eye, and that definitely didn’t really work that much, since I not a professional editor. That idea was out the window entirely. We had some other ideas in mind with different transitions that I can’t fully remember since we mentioned them once and then never spoke about them again.

But we did come to a conclusion after all! We discussed having the magnifying glass run over the words to make them “magnified”. I wish that was an actual effect, but you know, I have to do it manually. Doing this manually was pretty easy for me, but explaining it in words is somewhat weird since I just do it, but I will do my best.

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Discussing this verbally will get a little confusing, so I’ll also put a video of how I actually did it. The firs thing I did was pick a font, which I’ll go into more detail in another post. Once that was done, I had to make two different pictures of the text “Into The Truth”; one smaller picture, and one with a bigger font of it. Then, I had to create a png of a cartoon magnifying glass and put a circle of green screen in the circular part of the glass. Then, I had to create one video where the smaller words were the background and the magnifying glass was the second layer on the video. I moved it across the words smoothly and made it spin almost into a period in the end of the phrase. Once that rendered, I then put the larger text as the background. Putting the new video on top with the magnifying glass now on it, I had to mask out the green, somewhat like a green screen. Then, I had to fade out the big letters so the magnifying glass would smoothly become a period. Once that was done, I had my title card finished.

After this was finished, I simply put it in the title sequence in a smooth way, and that’s through some fading and sound bridging as well.

I was given the hefty task of editing the color of our title sequence, and iMovie really wasn’t doing what I needed it to, so I took to the app on my iPhone called Video Star. I had to pay money for the things I needed, but luckily I paid for it over a year ago, so it worked out well for me in this class.

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After loading the video into the app, I clicked the Multi-Layer button to load multiple layers into the video section. For the first layer, I put my actual video in for the first layer. Then, for the foreground, I put in a completely black picture, so it would be dark for the blending process. In Video Star, there’s a blending option that does different sort of combinations. I tried all of the different types of blending and they all just ended in a completely black video, but luckily there was one that gave us the exact lighting that we wanted. Since we had the lights on suuuuuuper bright because we were shooting at night, I had to edit in the dark lighting so it didn’t look so bright and not spooky like we wanted. After watching it through to make sure it was blending correctly, I clicked the finish button and let it run through one more time.

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After I showed it to Sitara she noticed the bed seemed a little over exposed, which I hadn’t noticed before, so I went back and lowered the exposure a bit while also making the video just a little bit darker and it looked much better than before. We didn’t want the evidence to be blinded or to take the audience’s attention away from that evidence because of a super shiny bed. That would be embarrassing. I tested different things in video star to be able to make the video a big darker and not as exposed, and I ended up lowering exposure in that one spot and also putting a picture of totally black color on the foreground of the video and made the transparency to about 50% so it would be a faded, dark color.

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For the office scene, I didn’t particularly need to change a whole lot, since that scene is meant to look more neutral and calmer because it take’s place in an office, and office typically have bland colors that aren’t meant to evoke too much emotion. So, when color correcting, I just turned down some exposures and made certain colors darker/more neutral if they really stood out too much. Doing this mostly brought the attention to the conversation taking place between the two characters rather than anything else that might be distracting in the background of the office or even the window. I know it looks like there’s nothing done but I swear some colors are muted and less of an issue to make the people stand out. I can’t make this stuff up.

Color correcting wasn’t as big of a challenge that I thought it was, since I have some experience in it before when just editing certain videos for fun. I’ve actually done something similar to this project a few months ago using the same editing software, but was a bit more inexperienced. I created a music video to the song How Long by Charlie Puth. The sound is also not so great in that video as well, but the experience gave me a better understanding to simply edit this title sequence in the best way possible.