Dream World Construction #25

      This video above shows how I created the dream world from start to finish - from scanning to Ken Burns tools. There was a lot that I learnt over this project, and a lot of that acquired knowledge came from this part of the music video alone. What was so daunting and yet so exciting about this part of the music video was the vast amount of technology I was going to use compared to the arguable two pieces of technology for the rest of the video.

     Learning all of this technology from scratch, I managed to construct quite an expertise for it over time and I used FCP X and the rest of the computer software to a higher level of professionalism. Considering this I decided to create my Top 5 list of the most advanced and most helpful pieces of software or tools I used over this part of the project.

Colour Correction

     I used colour correction a lot on the foundation portfolio where I created my opening to a film, but for this portfolio and this music video I got to grips with how colour correction worked and that meant I could do a lot more with it. There was a lot of editing and a lot of different cameras used, and this meant that our overall colour for parts (e.g. Band Performance) there was a vast difference between different shots. Manually changing colours on the colour correction helped massively. Within the Dream World construction though I used the colour correction for the background to emphasise the feeling of space but also unfamiliarity. I also colour corrected my character so that he would look more part of the scenery and less obvious green screen. 

Keying

    The Keying tool in FCP X was an obvious significant tool for the whole project as a third of it was green screen, however the tool itself was very professional. Green screen and its editing became hard at points and I needed to manually edit points of the shot to eliminate colour etc. The Keying tool and its manual abilities proved to be very useful as I used the sample colour often as well as the shrink/expand, soften and erode tools too. It is this kind of opportunity that our ambition and this project has given us to grow our uses in video-editing software and expand our knowledge greatly. The great thing about FCP X and software like it, is that it is much more powerful and useful than first looks.

Compositing

    Compositing was a tool in FCP X that I only came across throughout this project. Normally I don't scroll down the 'inspector' past 'Crop' but right at the bottom I found a handy tool that helped with the weirdness and unfamiliarity as well as keeping professionalism. We used the compositing tool to help give our keyed-animals a more unique look to the video. We also used it for our background and this was probably the best use we found. We used Colour Correction to give the background that look, but it was comprised of two images and we used the compositing tool to blend them together in a specific way and it was the most perfect outcome we could have hoped for.

 Fireworks

    Fireworks is the only one in this list that isn't a part of FCP X and yet it still had a huge impact and influence on my video. Final Cut was for editing the moving image, and Fireworks was for editing the still image. Fireworks is very similar to Final Cut, n regards to its hidden accessibility. I have used this piece of software a lot before so I knew my way around it, but I used it a lot more intensely over this project than any other. My main focus for using it was to edit the Dream World from the scanned images; collaborate them and colour them in to make it more cartoonish. However I also used Fireworks for the video in places such as the movement of the character in the second scene in the city, to edit the background separately, removing the character and editing the colour also. 

Ken Burns

   The Ken Burns effect was the most significant tool I used as it brought all of my pictures to life and in motion. I used it for almost all elements within this dream sequence as I wanted everything to look realistic - or as realistic as you can get with a cartoon world, dragons and flying green horses. Nevertheless though it brought everything together and made the final music video what it was, and all in a very simplistic way. That's the other great thing about Final Cut Pro, though there may be a lot of professionalism within the software there's a lot that can be done with the simple tools.