By: Mr. AJ
Happy Tuesday everyone! My name is AJ, and I filmed, edited, and helped storyboard the Valentine’s Day 2020 video for TMDE. Today I wanted to give you guys some editing tips I used during filming and post-production (that is the editing phase of a film project). Going into the project, based on some preliminary ideas and inspiration provided by Mandy and Brandy, we knew we wanted to make the video look as seamless as possible. This “one take” style of filming is actually very easy to do with several cool camera and editing tricks called invisible cuts. The best thing about this video is that for the viewers it’s only 2 minutes 36 seconds long. However, it took us nearly five hours of filming and three months of preparation! It looks like we did it all in one-take, but that is the magic of video editing.
I do need to give myself a disclaimer here, a few of these transitions were not as successful as others because I filmed the entire thing on a handheld DJI Osmo camera. It was very difficult to get some of the markers correct. My mistakes should help you all learn; however, so let’s get into it!
At the beginning of the video, we walked into the studio and came to the door of the green room. The type of invisible cut I wanted to use here was a fixed camera cut. This is when the camera stays in one place, allowing you to use that as a splicing point for the shots. Unfortunately, I was shooting with a handheld, so the shots did not quite line up, which caused some jitteriness that I had to fix digitally. This happened again at the end of the film as the camera lingered on the TMDE wall art in the blue room. I would not recommend this type of transition without having a solid setup or markers to assist.
Next, we had the transition out of the green room which worked perfectly. This is a cut into movement. Basically, you use the camera blur and an object as a cut point. For this shot, it was the wall as I moved the camera from the room to the hallway. This is a type of cut you can do with your phone camera and any object, although something like the edge of a wall or a tree are best.
As we walked down the hall, we came to zoom in on the heart. This was cleverly disguised and an easily achieved invisible cut. This is a cut into closeup or black. To achieve this, you walk the camera into an object that blacks out the entire shot. When you start your next shot, you begin closeup or blacked out and pull the camera away. When these shots are spliced together, it looks seamless. We utilized this type of invisible cut with the heart and again with the back of Mandy’s head. Each time we pulled back, there was something new happening. This is very fun and easy to do with any object, your phone camera, and a basic editing cut.
The last transition I did was not invisible. We wanted somewhat of a dream sequence of the little kids watching the older dancers and thinking about growing up. For that, I used some horizontal waves and cloudy effects around a fixed clear point. It took much longer to create than the actual shot itself took to play in the video, but that is the cruel nature of editing.
Anyway, I hope you can take some of these cool invisible cuts and use them with your own videos at home. They’re a ton of fun and they add dynamic movement to any video. To practice, I used my dog and had fun making him disappear and reappear in videos! Check out the Valentine’s Video here:
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