The idea for this project was to create a timeline. The theme was Self Portrait and we had to produce a video using Adobe Premiere. Another condition we were given was that the video had to consist of 3 different channels. I, therefore, decided that this would be in the form of 3 different timelines i.e. me going from baby to small child, child to teenager and teenager to present day.
To set about this, I decided that I would be the focus and my idea was to create a timeline of me growing up. This decision was driven by the fact that we had recently been looking through lot of old pictures that had been in our loft for a long time, some of which had me in them . I thought that this would be a perfect project on which to use these as a resource.
The steps taken were:
Collation of photographs. Scanning in these photos was very time consuming.
Arrangement of Folders: I decided to arrange the photos in several folders in the first two age groups i.e. baby to small child and child to teenager; later we found that my dad had already scanned some photos from my late teenage years into a folder, which I also used.
Initially, I made three different duplicates of the same project, and renamed each to correspond to the different timelines.
Following this, the first major step was to get the photos imported into the Premier project manually. The challenge was to ensure that the photos had the correct date, in order to create a consistent timeline. Initially, I looked for when the files were produced and the metric of time used was to look at the date modified in the file explorer. However, a little later, I realised that opening the file in the photo app and looking for “file information” would give me a more accurate date, as it listed information such as “date taken”, “camera used” and “shutter speed” etc. I clicked and dragged the files into the project timeline according to the date orders I had found in the files.
I wanted to get the eyes lined up, as the last time I produced a premier video this gave an excellent result. The amount of photos was a problem as once put in order the timeline was quite short.
I, therefore, had to strike a balance between how long to leave each photo on screen, without the video being too long and boring. I then decided for each photo to be on screen for about 5 seconds, and the transition time between each photo to be approximately 2 seconds.
I tried to get each video to last a couple of minutes each. This proved quite difficult up until I found a whole archive of photos on my computer - some were very old and were dated. The pictures were already separated in folders which were collated by the month/year they were taken in. This immediately gave me far more photos to work with and include in my presentation.
Lastly, most of the photos were from my childhood (from baby to teenager) but had increasingly long date gaps as I became older. There were also some photos I couldn’t use, which I either wasn’t in, or were taken at an angle that wouldn’t work in my video.
We also had to create a border around the photos to keep them confined to a particular area. I did this using the green screen method I used in a previous video project.
For backgrounds, I knew I would need to film some original material. To do this, I went for a walk in my local area and looked for natural environments in which to film. The place chosen to shoot the footage was in a park just down the road from me. As I went around I found some areas that I felt were relevant to both my past and childhood. The first of these places was a wooden seated area in the middle of an orchard, the second was a playground I played in as a small child. The third was a field, just outside the perimeters of the park. Finally, the last shot was of a pond. To match the lengths of the videos, I filmed for about 2 minutes each.
Following the Easter break, we were shown several videos from different artists. After this, I realised that I could be more creative with my own video, as it was too similar to another video I made in class two weeks ago. By this point it was too late to do a complete course correction, but the next best thing I could do was to change some aspects of my video to separate it more from what I had already done. First, I made the transition from each photo a lot more gradual and dynamic. I tried to make the video pictures change in a more fluid manner, making the transition from morph cut into more of a cross fade, increasing the length of the transition while making the pictures remain static on screen for less time. I spent a lot of time finding the perfect way to transition between the photos, thus video became shorter than before, typically averaging out to approximately 1 minute each.
To get over this problem, I added an extra part to each sequence so that as soon as the timeline finished moving forwards, I made it reverse back to the beginning. This resulted in each video being approximately 2 minutes in length.
I created some animations around the pictures, similar to my previous project, where I made shapes move around the pictures. This was an arduous task, because I wanted there to be at least a couple of animated elements on screen at any one point. The first problem I had was that I was trying to make too many things happen at once, so I slowed and dragged out the length of the animations a little. To ensure I could make sufficient progress, I took a layered approach so that I added small bits at a time. I first added the background elements that appeared furthest away, as I intended for them to be onscreen for the longest length of time. I added a bit more to each video until they had filled one layer. I then returned to the beginning, making a second layer and so on, until I had a satisfactory result. After that was completed, I reviewed the whole video again and I felt that it didn’t quite look like the result I wanted; I felt that the animations covered the background too much, whilst the foreground, specifically my portrait view, again was not being interrupted, with very little animation passing in front of it. To solve this problem, I put the background animations in the front of the portrait view and reduced their overall capacity. At this point, I was still unsatisfied with the results, so I changed the “blending modes” of the animation layers to see how they affected the video overall. Out of all the blending modes, the one I liked best was “overlay” because it changed the colour of the background, which I thought was a “cool” result, which I was ultimately happy with.
The one issue I noticed was there was no good indication of when the timeline was moving forwards. The idea I had was to add a play and rewind symbol in the corner of the screen, similar to that you would see when playing and rewinding a DVD. I made these symbols by using basic shapes and my TV remote as a reference point to make sure it looked accurate.
After this, I was at the point of exporting the videos. This was a more difficult task than I imagined because of the sheer size of the files. I made these into pre-comps, which meant I could condense the many video layers into a single timeline. I made separate pre-comps for each video channel and exported these using Adobe Media encoder, which allowed me to put all the videos into a queue.
After they were all exported, I added one more thing, this was in the form of an old video/VHS filter, to create a feeling of nostalgia and to make the play and rewind buttons make more sense. Thus, I had versions of the video with filters and separate versions without the filters applied.
Resources:
https://www.pexels.com/video/an-apple-tree-full-of-fruit-bearings-5527320/
https://www.pexels.com/video/green-leaves-3849645/
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