Hi! This will be my first post here and it will be dedicated to the making of a music video I produced a month ago entitled "Siya ka ba?"
That is the music video! :D Enjoy!
The making if the video was simple enough. As you can see, it involved simple cuts and shots. Some frames of the Philippines' National Hero, Jose Rizal portrayed by Gervin Rebulado.
PLANNING
Planning was THE most crucial part of the process. We needed to set who will make the song, who will arrange the song, how it would be recorded. For the video, since I was director, I had two things in mind. First was the timeline. How would we be able to do this video, this song, the post production in around a month? The other concern was what would the extra storyline be in the video?
I started by assigning three people to make the song. Neil Paras, Yana Pilante and me did the song. I wanted it to feel upbeat yet dark with a little gloom but keep it interesting enough to induce LSS to those who would hear it. They did a really good job, especially considering we were Nursing students. All we actually knew was sing and play some tunes. To make a song was out of our job description XD
Little did I know, the song would be the longest to make.
THE MUSIC
When we first started creating the song we crafted the overall theme. It had to be dark, serious and not full of praise for our Hero. I know for sure that those times of rebellion and wars was not like typical superhero flicks these days where the hero is portrayed as the ultimate in goodness and heroism. Those times were times of betrayal, bloodshed, and illustration of humanity's hunger for power, sex and money. I immediately knew from that point of view that I did not want to make a song in the major scale full of words of heroism. We instead wanted to challenge the audience if we, the modern Filipino, can be like him.
I have to say I was happy with the song. We practiced then recorded. The vocalist is Ian reyes, the two guitarists were me and Jewel Reyes. Bassist was Kyle Pavia and Drummer (more like keyboard drummer) was Neil Paras.
THE VIDEO
Though I knew we would be graded (yes, this was a project for our Rizal Course) based on content and the video itself, I wanted to make something completely in the spirit of a music video. The Music quality should be good, the Video itself must be good. I went into this project with a 65% fluff attitude, like music videos today.
The side story I chose was a fragmented one. I decided to show how our culture of today doesn't seem as great as our heroes' stories have told us they wanted. Poverty everywhere, White washed Filipinos etc etc. Then I also opted to include shots of the modern Filipinos, possibly modern Rizals. These are the police, atheletes, students, nurses etc of our time.
I used a Rebel T2i/550D, the 18-135 Kit Lens which I borrowed from a friend, Miguel Porcuna. A tripod, a reflector and a DIY camera stabilizer.
Photo by Danica Panganiban
That was the setup basically. And we shot at Rizal Park :D PROTIP: When shooting with DSLR you should turn the contrast, sharpness and the other setting down to the lowest settings. This gives you high dynamic range which will be easier to color grade in post.
After the shoot, I sat in front of my PC and started working. First thing you may have noticed is the color correction. This was all done in After Effects CS5. I used some Curves and Levels adjustments to color grade.
For the studio shots I recorded the whole performance of the band for I think around 3 times. We were pressed with time, but I could have recorded more footage as I found myself lacking band performance footage during post.
Next thing you might have noticed are the anamorphic Lens Flares. I used Magic Bullet Looks for that. I just choose that from the Lens menu and adjusted the threshold to get the flares I wanted
You also may have noticed that the footage was kind of stable but would kind of get blurred a bit. That's because I stabilized the footage in After Effects. I forgot to set the correct shutter speed during the shoot and that explains the blur. PROTIP: When shooting at 24fps or 30 fps or 60 fps, the shutted speed must be set at least double of that so motion blur would be minimized. A shutter speed too high will result in really unsmooth videos as it looks like the image is "jumping"
I really loved the part where Rizal got shot. I shot that at 60fps so I could slow it down to 24 fps as he is about to fall creating a smooth slow mo shot. Then I composited some elements to it from Videocopilot's Action Essentials 2. And created that shot :D
Now for the epic explosions behind walk I did some slow mo with Twixtor, composited the exploding footage onto the frame, motion tracked those elements, and rotoscoped Rizal. It could have been better but I ran out of time.
Lastly, for the shot transitioning to the dove in the air. I got some footage of a dove off youtube. Used a free plugin called Unmult for After Effects and keyed out the black background. I also got a picture of a sky off google the placed that layer directly on top of the Rizal being shot footage. I then keyframed the position of both so that the Rizal frame would go down and be replaced with the Dove footage with the sky. Really simple.
IN CONCLUSION
So yeah, that's basically it. Though sadly, our video wasn't chosen for the contest, I really had fun making this video. It was certainly an experience.
I also have a cool video coming soon and here's a sneak peak lulz.
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