WML

This is a piece I worked on as part of my internship with Blue Lion Multimedia.

I didn’t shoot any of this footage; rather, my contributions were all in post.

The bulk of the video was edited in Premiere. I went through all the footage and pulled what I thought was usable, then sorted it into categories—drone shots, shots with people, shots of dirt moving, etc. There wasn’t a narrative to build, so it was more about lining things up with the music.

At one point, I sped up/slowed down/sped up a long, slow shot of a machine moving some dirt so that it energetically snapped right to the song. I liked the effect so much that I implemented it in a few more spots throughout—the piece was to be used as an attention-grabbing Instagram ad.

I’m most proud of my After Effects work on the piece. The opening shot, obviously shot from a drone, featured zero clouds. I knew I wanted to fade in from white given the eventual Instagram placement of the ad, so I added multiple stock footage clips of clouds with an Alpha channel on top of the drone footage, which move in 3D towards the camera as they lose opacity, lending the fade-in a sense of arrival at the construction site.

The “DEMOLITION” and “SITE WORK” shots were not required to involve any After Effects work—but when I saw the basically flat plane provided in this first piece of footage, I became inspired:

I motion tracked the camera movement onto an After Effects camera, and placed the title into the shot in 3D space. I then had to rotoscope the crane arms out, nearly frame by frame. This involved a second, subtract mask on the yellow crane for the hole created by the hydraulic on top of the arm—you can see the “O” poking through underneath in the picture above.

The “SITE WORK” shot only involved tracking the camera movement, which I performed on the entire, uncut piece of footage. After rendering the shot out to Premiere, I replicated the same splicing/retiming as I had done to the footage initially, to achieve music sync now with the title animated in.

Thank you to Marty Shoup and Blue Lion Multimedia for the video usage.