Something I think plays a huge role in video making is the colour of the footage. I'm not too fond of raw-looking media, like the footage I took, so I decided to have a play around with the possibilities on Premiere Pro. I tried to vary the subject as well as its environment, eg. shooting in late evening then in the morning, or taking footage of someone with much flesh to compare with the green-rich plantation in my aquarium. I think in doing so will allow me to explore more possibilities as I have different elements to work with.
For this challenge, I determined to attempt at creating the footage vintage-looking. I think this is something that has been trending for the past few years amongst varying-genre music videos, from pop to indie. Some examples include;
Home (2010) - Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes
I believe that these artists have similar target markets to mine, so I thought it was a good idea to see what type of colouring is common amongst other artists who are promoting themselves to similar target audience.
I decided to seclude the footage with effects on and off so that the difference is noticeable and comparable. Like stated in the video, the footage on the left is with effects ON, and the footage on the right is with effects OFF.
Something else I wanted to give a go to was to try and turn the raw footage into somewhat old film-inspired looking. I decided to have a look on the internet on any old film footage that I could overlay in Premiere Pro. I found this clip, which loops, that includes a flicker effect of dust and scratches; something that will hint a vintage feel. However, when it comes to creating my media product, I will have to use only my footage, so getting this sort of video will be troublesome and I will most likely decline this idea, but I still wanted to test it out and see what impact it has on the clips.
The first few sections were shot in my sisters' room. I thought that the christmas lights they have wrapped around the bunk bed was creating interesting lighting on the surroundings. I chose one of my younger sisters, Adele (aged 3) to play around in the area and see how the different coloured lights fall on her. Additionally, she had an extra light with her that she could manually control and I thought this would be another interesting impact on the surroundings when this light is switched on.
w/o effects
The effects I chose for this footage were Luma Curve, RGB Curves and Noise.
The Luma Curve effect helps you adjust the footage's brightness and contrast using a curve technique. It also lets you specify the colour range to correct using the Secondary Colour Correction controls. The curve is first seen as a straight diagonal line across the axis. I adjusted it so the top, where the brightness is focused, was tilted slightly down, lowering the whiteness. The middle affects the mid-tones, but I chose to stick with the original setting for this area. For the low end, where the shadows are affected, I chose to lighten these slightly by rising the end and curving it slightly to give a nice transition between the shadows, mid-tones and highlights.
The RGB Curves is a similar effect to Luma Curves except that the adjustments are allowed to control the colour channels instead of the contrast. Like before, the top end focuses on highlights, the middle on mid-tones, and the lower end on shadows. This means, for example, if I play around with the red channel curve, I could adjust its saturation in either areas; highlights, mid-tones or shadows. At this stage, I decided to enhance the red in the shadowed area, so the lower end was slightly lifted. I decided to exclude the red in the mid-tone and highlighted areas, so these were lowered. I also decided to change the blue channel, increasing this colour in highlights and lowering it in the shadows, like seen in the graph above. This resulted with reddened shadows and blue highlights. I left the other two channels remaining in their original positions.
The Noise effect adds grain to the footage. Although originally the quality of the footage already consisted of hints of noise, I wanted to add more. You can adjust the amount of noise by sliding the option. I settled with 10% as I thought this was a fair amount. I also checked the Noise Type to use Colour Noise, which adds random values to red, green and blue channels individually.
w/ effects
The second focus was an individual in daylight. I chose my second sister, Emily (aged 7) to model for this area. I think that the skin tones were something new to work with in comparison to the previous, mostly blue challenge. I think that, especially in this shot, the contrast is too great and makes the slightly red around her eyes really stand out. I always wanted more focus on her eyes, but these were distracted by the dark hair covering her eyes.
w/o effects
I stuck with the same settings for Luma Curve, like used for the previous colouring. I thought this fixed the contrast a little and lightened up the shadows and lowered the highlights.
I decided to introduce a slightly different effect than the RGB Curves effect. This effect is called Fast Colour Corrector. It adjusts the clip's colour using, instead of the curve technique, hue and saturation colour wheel controls. The hue balance is controlled by the small circle seated on the end of the balance magnitude (the angle line). When this circle is drawn further or closer to the edge of the colour wheel, it adjusts the hue translation. If the yellow rectangular shape located in the centre is drawn across the line that connects it to the circle, it adjusts the saturation of the hue. With these settings, I decided to add a very faint hint of blue, like seen on the colour wheel. I also decided to change the input levels, drawing the white indicator across the line towards the mid-tones, which decreased the intensity of the highlights.
I decided to, once again, add some Noise to the footage to give it a hint of that vintage look. However, this time, I only chose 5% so that there were only faint areas of colour noise.
w/ effects
This footage was taken during a sunny day indoors. Although the location (the living room) is the same like in the previous shot, the lighting had a different impact on the subject. Such as the intensity of the highlights was greater.
w/o effects
By this time, I was quite fond of Luma Curves' ability, so I decided to stick to it when I wish do adjust the contrast. In this case, I wanted to decrease the intensity of the highlights, so I curved the top end of the line down ever so slightly. For the shadows, I thought that the face was too dark, so I decided to brighten this area by raising the lower end to show the facial features better.
The Three-Way Colour Corrector may look new, but it does the same job like the RGB Curves. The only difference that matters is the technique of adjustment. This effect uses the colour wheel controls. Again, we are given the three options to change; shadows, mid-tones and highlights. I decided to draw the highlights towards the pink area so that there is a slight tint of pink to the white areas in the footage. To contrast this, I decided to draw the shadows towards the blue area to give the footage a cold contrast within the darker areas. I left the mid tones in its original state.
w/ effects
To work with something new, I decided to capture a few shots of my aquarium, which is overgrown with live plants. I thought that with the extreme amount of green would be something new to work with.
w/o effects
This time, using Luma Curve, I decreased the highlights quite a lot as I thought there was a lot of highlights on the surfaces of the leaves. With the shadows, I decided to increase.
Using the Three-Way Colour Corrector, I included hints of red in the darker areas of the footage by dragging the circle towards the red edge of the colour wheel. I decided to do a similar adjustment to the highlights, increasing the tint to a light pink. Instead of changing the extreme green, I decided to work around it.
w/ effects
Something else I learnt during this task was the possibility of copying and pasting an effect from a clip onto another clip when working with the footage in the sequence. It is also possible to copy over multiple effects. I found this feature very useful because it saved a lot of time so there was no need for me to recreate the effect to exact settings as before as I could just copy over the effect in its adjusted state from clip to clip.
I held down command and selected multiple effects from a clip's Video Effects tab before right-clicking for the drop-down menu for the copy option.
I then switched to the unedited clip and pasted the effects by right-clicking in an empty space under the Video Effects tab, and pasted the effects over.
I conclude that I have learnt quite a few things in this task. I have understood how the effects function, like the Luma Curve, RGB Curve, Noise, Fast Colour Correctorand the Three-Way Colour Corrector, and how I'm able to apply their abilities and adjust the settings of raw footage. I think that being able to change the contrast and colour of the footage may be the basics, but I think with these capabilities I'll be able to make enough changes to the appearance of clips to fit the atmosphere of my chosen song 'Flip'.
