Your challenge for next week is to produce a “Found Footage” trailer. Record your very short story as the audio track and use properly cleared clips from Videoblocks, YouTube (“,creativecommons”), archive.org and other appropriate legal sources to create a trailer.
Your trailer should include the following:
- a voice-over from your very short story (may be a new version)
- legal music
- titles
- at least one overlay of a still image/graphic (may be part of the title)
- variable clip speeds (slow or fast motion)
- a crop and pan
- at least one very special effect transition of your choice
This will help us practice
- workflow
- file management
- finding good materials
- understanding copyright, creative commons, and fair use
- audio recording and processing
- editing
My Submission
Lessons Learned:
- More knowledge => Better Stories
- The pace of a good sentence does not necessarily translate to a good pace for a video
- Sounding natural and engaging in a voice-over is super hard
- Importance of finding matching visual elements and matching camera movements
- Need a shot-list that includes visual elements and movement standardization
- So many easy ways to do amazing things (transition packs, templates, presets)
- Expanded my knowledge of available effects in Premiere and how they can be layered and used together to create more complex effects.
- So many ways to better organize workflow (nesting, etc.)
- “Cool” transitions can be over-used and misused. (I kept a few over-used and misused transitions in the video above as examples.)
- Learned more about After Effects (6 hours of work) though absolutely nothing I created in After Effects was good enough to put in this video. Lots of learning left to do.
Where to find footage:
- Videvo has some great free material
- Storyblocks has video, photo, and audio + After Effects Templates ($149/year)
- Search YouTube, adding “,creativecommons” to find material you can use if you are not monetizing your video
- Use archive.org to find good historical footage
- Great photos at Pixabay
For Music:
- Go to Create/Music Policies in your YouTube Creator Studio
- Search for the song you want to use and check the permissions (0:55)
- If you found a song, use a YouTube converter to download
- Find unknown artists and ask them if you can use their music
- Support a rising artist on Patreon in exchange for their music (I support Panthurr and Andrew Applepie)
- Check out the YouTube Audio Library (though these are over-used)
- There is some music on Storyblocks
- Also consider purchasing a subscription to artlist.io or something like that.
I also have a playlist of “good free music” on YouTube you can browse.
Recording the Voice-Over
- Use the Zoom + a lavalier + headphones to monitor.
- Eliminate as many sounds in your environment as possible. (There is a sound-room in Hale Library.)
- If all else fails, get as many blankets as you can and just bury yourself in the blankets while you do the voice-over.
- Set levels on the Zoom so it peaks about -6dB.
The quickest way to tweak your audio in Premiere:
Remove Background Noise with Audition
Advanced Processing in Audition if you want it to sound amazing:
In short:
- Normalize to -1dB
- Use equalizers and dynamic processing to get the tone like you want it.
- Amplify and Compress
- Noise reduction
- Normalize again
- Cut breaths and unwanted sounds
- Normalize again
- Hard Limit to -1dB or use an amplifier or multiband compressor preset (7:00)
Adding Titles & Graphics
Jump to 1:30 for the good stuff.
Slow and Fast Motion
Pan/Crop “Fake Camera Movements”
1:00 – Zoom
2:40 – Pan
4:30 – Rotation
5:30 – Combination Zoom and Rotation
Organizing the Chaos
Backing stuff up:
Subsequences:
Special Effects in Premier Pro
Special Effects in After Effects
The Pros use these presets to seem amazing:
What is After Effects?
The basics of After Effects:
How to use After Effects templates
