Yet another video project i’d been working on for a while. It all started when I ordered my Green Screen. I did a couple of Visual FX tests using Troy which I never even bothered to upload to YouTube ’cause they were dumb (if we’re friends on Facebook, you can check it out there). Then I was looking at all these things on YouTube where people were doing the sillouette thing from the iPod commercials, and i was like: “I can totally do that.”
So late one night after dinner, I was thinking about it and the idea of having the sillouette interact with the background popped into my head. So I quickly mentioned it to Rob who hopped on board right away. We quickly discussed the different styles of music that we’d flow through, the rough amount of time it’d take per song, set up the lights, set up the camera, and Rob danced his butt off for about 2 hours straight.
The funniest thing about it was that we had no music to dance to, ’cause the original plan was to write original music for the video! So I set my metronome on 130 bpm, and put on the silly little drum loops that came with it and Rob danced to it. If I had thought of it, I would have uploaded some of the footage I worked with before the final product… it’s pretty ridiculous. Rob was a good sport.
Anyway, when I started editing it, I played around a lot just trying to get the sillouette to look good. Since we had nothing to anchor the green screen to the ground, it kept bunching up while Rob was dancing, so weird shadows kept popping up in the sillouette shots. So once I keyed out all the green for all the different shots and turned him into a sillouette, I then had to form a new composition out of the stuff I already edited and then rotoscope out the extra noise.
I added waves shooting out of his hands every time he touches the background/foreground to make it look like he’s actually making contact with the color. The lightsticks were rotoscoped in using the Lightsaber Preset from VideoCopilot. Nothing too fancy there, although it was tricky to rotoscope them in. I got a little lazy, but it goes by so quickly, it all seems to work very well. See if you can catch the part where I make it look like Rob lets go of a lightstick for a split second and then grabs it again.
The toughest part was the music. I started working on the music one night and then realized that coming up with 10 seconds of 3 different songs was just about the same amount of work as writing 3 complete songs. The amount of work that goes into making it sound like a “pro” recording or a “real” recording is immense. So I copped out and grabbed snippets of songs I had already written… with the exception of the hip hop song. I asked a couple of friends, but they ignored me (thanks Mike!) and so I ran to garageband and grabbed a random hip hop song I found there. I doubt he’ll even find out, let alone mind.
So then I added some simple sound effects to try to make it sound like it was swooshing by… incidentally YouTube doesn’t playback in stereo, so all my panning work is lost on the audience! Anyway, I think it turned out pretty well! If only more people would watch it on YouTube. I crave the numbers… crave it I tell you.
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