Ewan Wild spent 4 weeks producing a music video. In week 1, he created the song by adding instruments, finding a drum beat, and adding a calm melody and sampled dialogue. In week 2, he began editing and created transitions like color-changing filters and sliding columns. Week 3 involved improving the beginning and end, like adding a zooming logo and iris fade. The final week focused on refinements like split-screen cuts and color corrections to improve continuity. Though not fully satisfied with his original idea, Ewan felt the production process helped him learn Premiere Pro skills for future projects.

1. Production Diary
Ewan Wild

2. Week 1
Week one has been a very busy start to the week. In this week I
mostly concentrated on making my music for the music video. I
started out by adding the instruments that I wanted to use, more
were added later but this was only at the beginning. Arguably
the most important part was the drum beat. I needed something
that had a clear and quick beat. It didn’t take too long to find
one that worked, and the rest of my song was based off that. I
then proceeded to create the melody for my song. I knew the
type of melody that I wanted, something that sounds calm and
easy on the ears, so eventually I found some pre-made melodies
that sound exactly like the type of thing I wanted, and after
changing them a little bit to make them more my own, I was
done with that area. I wanted something simple for my guitar
sound, however nothing I could make sounded good. I didn’t like
the guitar sounds that Garageband has. To get past this I brought
in my own guitar and hooked it up to my mac. This allowed me
to create what I wanted using a real guitar sound, which was
much more natural. To finish off the song, I sampled some
sentences from viral videos and added them to various parts off
the song. It just made it more interesting, rather than just being
normal, boring piano.

3. Week 2
As of week 2 I could finally start editing. After I exported my finished song, I went
straight to work with the opening. A time-lapse from the station to The Minister
with quick edits on the beat to the song. As shown at the bottom, each beat has a
different editing technique to it in an attempt to keep the video fresh and more
exciting. This took up a lot of time and the introduction itself took over a day to
finish. In the introduction I used the beat to change filters, the angle of the shot,
and used the beat to add the title. I then moved on to create different transitions.
As shown on the left, I created one that changes in columns. This took a while to do
but I was very pleased with the outcome. I used several masks using the crop tool to
make it, and the shot was cut into different sections to allow for different amounts
of masks. The transition is smooth and is something that I’ve never done before.
When that was done, I moved onto another transition. This one is one I practiced in
my experiments, creating a motion blur using an adjustment layer and a slide
transition. This was simple and didn’t take too long due to the fact that I had
practiced it beforehand in pre-production.

4. Week 2
On the final day of week two I got into some more complex areas of editing. Instead of
just making certain areas of the shot black and white to reflect the age of the city, I
made it so the black and white areas gradually expanded over the course of the shot.
This makes it look so much better and the black and white areas look very realistic. I
came across a problem early on where I wasn’t able to stabilize a shot properly on
Premiere. To overcome this, I had to open the shot on After Effects, which was able to
stabilize better. From this it was automatically placed back into premiere working much
better than it did before. Finally, I managed to bring together the rest of my shots. This
means final length of my project has been set as all the shots have been cut together
and are placed where I want them to. Although from this it may seem like I’m close to
being done, I’m nowhere near. Next week I will concentrate on the more complex areas
of my project as although I have finished the basics I still need to complete a variety of
transitions and other effects that will keep my piece more interesting.

5. Week 3
On week three I concentrated on improving the beginning and end
of my project. I started by editing my logo slightly so it worked with
my video, as keeping it square just didn’t look as good. To make it
more interesting, I made a camera-like outline including a red button
like it’s recording, this button then turned into the logo using key
framing and changing the size and position. I then had to remove
this logo to make way for the content. Originally I had a cross
dissolve and just let it fade out, but this didn’t look very good and
instead I used an iris round fade placed in the center of logo, to
make everything leave from inside out. The end is much more
simple, I created a quick logo using Photoshop, and from there I
added the Y separately to the rest of the word, then the line after
that, all on the beat. From there I added a cross zoom for the words
making them zoom in really close, and added a white shot in the
background so it properly fades to white after the zoom. This ending
is much better than just the music fading and the shot suddenly
coming to an and as it gives actual closure to the piece. As of now
there is only one week left of production. In this time I hope to
perfect my project as there are some little areas that could do with
improvements. In the short break we have I could come up with
some more ideas that will hopefully lead to an improved project
that looks better than it did at the start of this week.

6. Week 4
The final week of production was spent on improving the
little things. For example, I started off by improving some of
my edit to make them seem more interesting. As shown on
the top left, I went from a normal cut to cutting the screen in
half on the beat. After this I thought for one cut I needed to
improve it. The table colour was too different from one
another so in an attempt to fix this, I used colour correction
to make the first table appear more grey when it was
originally brown. Another change I made before exporting
was adding my name to the end. I made the white at the end
drag out for a bit longer and faded in my name. This makes
the ending of my video seem more like an ending, rather
than the video just stopping suddenly. I much prefer it now
when originally it did just stop. After these changes were
made I then exported it, and my production was finished.

7. Conclusion
Even though I wasn’t too happy with my idea. I think production went quite well.
Although some of my original ideas weren’t included, I have come out with a finished
product that shows that I can use Premiere Pro well. There were some things that I
didn’t think was perfect, however I will talk about that in my evaluation. I learnt a lot
in my production and it has allowed me to take the next step to making a very good
FMP.