Production - TIMELINE PREVIEWS

A short preview of the music video

Two clips from the timeline of You Know My Name showing particles in action in the CGI world

Exporting the timeline as it is for previewing

Production - PYROTECHNICS

Pyrotechnic Shot List

I'm going to settle with parts of the equipment making sparks at random during the last chorus. The four screenshots are examples of camera angles in the timeline in which pyrotechnics will be detonated. 

The pyrotechnics themselves will be small explosions of sparks, with varying size, emitting from various pieces of equipment. 

To achieve this, I will consult Greg - one of the crew members in You Know My Name, who is experienced in the field - his EPQ project is a construction of various pyrotechnics. 

Above is a shot list for each pyrotechnic. I need to be very specific about the shot angle and timecode for each detonation, to make the compositing look realistic.

Greg will construct the pyrotechnics for me once I have given him the details of what I need, and then together we will shoot against either a black screen or a green screen to composite the sparks into the shots.

Production - FIRST DRAFT OF LIVE PERFORMANCE

Two weeks and two days since the first shoot - first draft of the music video's live performance element is complete. 

After having speedily moved through the majority of the band performance footage, which amounts to just under 6 hours of shot footage, the best clips have made the timeline to almost completely fill blank spaces. Some parts of the timeline are empty of footage: these areas are markers, to make room for something like this:

There is a clear difference in the look of the particle streams here and in the streams in the post below. This is because the scale of the You Know My Name CGI Environment. This is because the YKMY world is much, much larger than the world in which the first particles (below) were created. More turbulent force and more velocity were needed to increase the scale and effect of the streams - so in loosing the smooth ribbons and coils, I gained lighting-like streams which truly do take the appearance of audio waveforms. 

Production - PARTICLE SIMULATIONS FROM BLENDER

Yesterday I was experimenting on Blender - I was looking for something extra to add to the CGI world because it felt very simple, and not quite as grand-scale as expected. On VideoCopilot (A website for After Effects tutorials) I saw a tutorial for creating an audio waveform, glowing and shimmering in 3D space, in After Effects. However the effect required trapcode particular, an expensive plug-in I don't have access to. 

After watching the tutorial, I went into Blender - which has a complex built-in particle simulator - and after many hours of trying different things, I came across this effect and fell in love with it. Below is a 40 minute tutorial I recorded on how to create such a particle stream.

These glowing audio waveform type simulations will appear in You Know My Name and potentially another music video I have very recently begun work on outside of school, on Muse's Madness.

Production - EDITING IN PREMIER AND AFTER EFFECTS