Production: Adding Effects

I have now begun perfecting the first 2 minutes of the first draft of my music video. 

I have been using many different effects and editing techniques. The approach I have taken for my video is to present it as half real-life and half cartoon like and so I have been trying to have different cartoon elements in my film. 

However, I came across a problem when I discovered that my editing application, Final Cut Pro X, is not compatible with moving GIFs and this was a huge issue for me because it meant that none of the cartoon images that I wanted to insert could be moving. However, I have worked a lot with keyframes in order to give some of my images movement to make them look as lovely as possible!

Near the beginning of my video I have inserted a PNG of a rainbow. I used transitions to make it slowly wipe in from the left to the right, and then fade out just before Max runs across the screen. I carefully used the transform tools to alter the scale and position of the rainbow and line the flat edge up with the roof of the house. This also involved changing the angle of rotation. It looks great with the blue sky!

Also, I added a cartoon sun in when Max sings "look how the sun shines brightly". Again, it was originally motionless but to make it look slightly more part of the frame, I added a 'flashing' effect to the sun. I had to alter the intensity of the effect so that it wasn't too overwhelming. I also added a 'spot' effect to the shot of Max so that it looked like the sun was beaming onto his face and this fades in when the frame tilts upwards!

My favourite cartoon addition so far is the cartoon birds I have used later on in the video. I used keyframes in order to move the birds up and down flying across the screen. When sped up it looks like they are actually flapping their wings...especially the blue one! I am really happy with this effect.

The final effect I have added is in the shot with Jak lying on the grass. I added different cartoon flowers that I found online. Again, in order to give them motion I used key frames, but this time in order to alter the scale of them as opposed to the position. They all grow at different times and paces throughout the frame.

One problem I did have with the flowers was the fact that because the shot was filmed without a tripod, since I had to hold the camera vertically, it was quite shaky and because of that, sometimes the flowers went on top of Jak. Therefore I made use of the stabilisation tools. I set it to automatic but turned the smoothing up to 3.0 in order to make it as least shaky as I could. It now looks a lot more steady and the flowers stay growing around him as opposed to on his face!

Overall I am really happy with the effects I have added so far. Some may need a small amount of alteration but I am planning on gaining some audience research shortly and will see if there is anything that they do or do not like!