Evaluation of the special effects.

Although our film lacked many different camera angles and different camera shots i think we gained an advantage on our use of post production and especially the use of special effects.

Final cut was a brilliant tool to add a variation of special effects which went perfectly with our concept and helped keep in contact with our inspiration. it also helped to keep the film interesting and constantly changing.

We didn't want the music video to jump straight into trippy visuals and changes of speed but instead we wanted it to gradually get more surreal as the video and the music went on we tried to keep all special effects in time with the music and use certain effects to emphasize important changes in either the tempo or new sounds.

The first special effect isn't anything advanced or anything spectacular but it was the first one we experimented with and is an effect which once introduced to the video is a constant element to the video and this was the change in speed throughout the video we either increased or decreased the speed of the footage to keep with the tempo of the music.

At 00:29 seconds of the video the music track drops from the airy sound to a much faster pace and dancey beat we wanted to emphisize this sudden change in the tempo in the video so we increased the tempo of the footage at the same time. To do this we selected the clip on the timeline and pressed ctrl and clicked this came up with a menu box in which included speed by clicking on speed we were given the option to change the speed from 100% which is the normal speed of the footage to anything we wanted we experimented with a few different speeds and decided that 300% was the perfect speed for the footage to go well with the music

we kept this speed contant until our next special effect was added

I Believe the speed goes perfectly with the song and works really well with the drop in the music although because the footage was filmed by hand there is shakes from the filming after seeing the footage i thought about how i could illiminate those shakes if i was to do the footage again. I came up with a simple idea of riding on a skateboard this would keep the footage much smoother and wouldn't be a solution which was to expensive.

The next use of special effects is also a fairly simple use of special effectes but when used in conjunction with this music track it went perfect and almost seemed like the footage was moving to the music just the trippy and weird effects we wanted to achieve

At around 1:25 we introduced a distort called wobble we timed this perfectly with the first introduction of the famous dubstep bass because the bass is the most important convention of dubstep we wanted to make sure that it was visually recognizable

To implement the special effect we clicked on the clip and went to the toolbar on the top of the mac and clicked on effects and then distorts and then wobble sometimes you have to wait for the footage to render and this is the time it takes for the footage to be edited and changed so that it has the effect we experimented with a view different distorts such as ripple and others but none seemed to go aswell with the music.

This effect was used on the same footage as the speeded up clips and even this footage is speeded but because theres a wobble theres actually less of the camera shaking so the shake wasn't as much of an issue although i am certain that if we had worked out how to reduce to wobble before filming the effect would of looked even better.

Through the video we have different clips overlapping each other and playing at the same time we did this to emphasize some kind of confusion and make it seem like the caracther was never quite sure were he was and i also think it helped to keep a constant connection between the different scenes

Pulling of this effect was slightly more complicated but once achieved i think it looked pretty good although at some points may of been to confusing for the viewer and maybe distracting from what was happening on screen although we tried to fade in and out of important scenes such as when the mysterious caracter is walking to the camera which is on the floor

on final cut we placed the two pieces of footage we wanted to use on the two different timelines for our personal organisation we kept the main clips on the bottom timeline and the clips playing over the op on the top time line once we had them positioned to player over each other we had to reduce the opaqueness off the clip we didn't want to stand out as much this was fairly simply as there is a line through the clips which if you pull down with the arrow tool reduces the opaqueness we kept most of the secondary less important clips to around 30% whilst the main clips played at 100%

The last use of special effects draws many skills from across the other special effects we learnt to use and this created something very close to the inspiration of the itunes visualizer but it might not of always gone perfectly with the music

At around 4:13 you see the most advanced special effects and this is two clips playing at the same time the main clip has no effects and is back at the graftti scene whilst the second clip's opacuness is reduced its speed was increased to over a 1000% and a filter called kalidoscope was added with this many effects the macbook pro found it hard to play the footage smoothly and this made diting a problem which probably didn't help with trying to keep it in time with the music to achieve so many effects we slowly added each effect to make sure we hadn't over done it and to make sure we were achieving what we had envisioned.

We took a piece of footage which wasn't used any were else in the film and this was another car scene but in the middle of brighton it was a fairly long clip which was well over 20 minutes we and the kaleidoscope effect by clicking effects then perspectives then kaleidoscope we really liked this effect and thought it was amazing but the lights form the city were not making a big enough impact so we speeded it up gradually until we reach 1000% this meant the footage changed enough to keep interesting and in time with the music we then placed it on the first time line above the graffiti footage we reduced the opaqueness so it was still there but there was other things going on around the trippy visual to keep with the storey line

In conclusion i feel that the special effects are one of the strongest points of the video and earn it much more merit then it takes away although i would of liked features of the final kalidoscope effect to be more in time with the music i am pleased with how we gradually fall into the effects and how they do go in time with the music.