Final Non-Narrative film & Editing examples

My non-narrative, though all footage was recorded by myself using multiple liquids and surfaces, was very heavily edited using two soft-wares; Premiere Pro and After Effects. I clocked a total of 40+ hours of editing on this piece.

As there are over 100 different compositions within the film, I will only explain how I did the ones I found most interesting.

The opening shot of the film shows a ball of light growing from center screen, revealing a moving border that is made up or mirrored eagles:

To do this, I first needed to edit the original footage. Here is the original eagle:

I used a stencil to create the shape and spray pens to apply the ink, after removing the stencil, I blew at it through a straw to make the ink run off in different directions. Then once in Premiere, I cropped around the area I needed and keyed out the remaining white back ground and placed it on a new black background. Then I applied the mirror effect to it and set the reflection point directly center of the tail feathers. Finally, to create the outline, I maxed out the contrast and brightness to get a solid blue colour, which I then keyed out using ultra key, allowing anything underneath its track in the timeline will be visible through the mirrored Eagle-shaped "hole".

To create the growing light in the centre, I first had to record the movement of it. Here is the original:

As you can see, it only expands to one side of the paper, which didn't make mirroring this clip very easy. To do this, I had to manually piece together two copies of the same clip side by side and then nest them together to have simultaneous control of both clips as and when I wished, this is because the perimeters of the original clip would not allow it to simply be mirrored. This time I didn't key out the white, instead, I inverted the image, which resulted in turning the white paper into black, and the purple spray into a light turquoise colour.

Once I had place this clip under the eagles clip, I then centered the images up.

The biggest thing with this film for me was to try and match all compositions with the beat of the music. One of the best examples of this within my film (I feel) is roughly 25 seconds into the film when the coloured streaks shoot from the bottom to the top of screen. This took roughly 3 hours to get right. Here is the original:

I only used an individual streak of colour because they each fell at different speeds, so I picked the one that traveled from to top to bottom the fastest to match the beat. I then placed copies of the clip on different tracks of the timeline in time with the beat and moved them either side of the original for a more interesting look. I also used the HUE tool to change each streak's colour to add variety.

When I showed my final film to my lecturer, he said everything was fine, apart from one transition, which is where a ladder like object starts to pan down screen and get closer and closer to the "camera" until it goes black:

As it gradually gets closer and closer, it fades to black, which originally I found quite nice, but my lecturer pointed out that it became blurry as it wasn't recorded in 4:4:4 picture quality. He asked me to try and think of a different way around it, to which I came back with this:

Now the lines stay the same size, but shoot symmetrically around screen, eventually making it all black.

Overall, I am really happy with how my film looks, I personally think it is unique compared to other films I have seen of the same genre.

A side advantage of this was I managed to implement this into my narrative film briefly, too!