To kick off week 4 we again spent time in Building 9’s edit suites. Today we were let loose in Premiere and encouraged to explore and experiment with the footage we had shot in previous weeks – especially the footage from our ‘abstract’ exercise. Having spent the night before staring at a Premiere timeline for another subject (until 2am), I was initially a bit slow to again open up the editing program. However, once I started playing around with the footage we shot on Friday I got into an experimental mood and started looking for interesting ways to combine and juxtapose the different shots we captured.
As we have been encouraged to use different sequences for different purposes I decided to make a sequence in my Premiere project purely for editing tests and experiments. In the class I tried out a variety of transitions, mask effects and colour grades in my ‘experimental’ sequence, and I think I found some really interesting ways to edit the footage together. I think it’s really important to experiment like this when trying to ‘master’ programs like Premiere (and Photoshop, After Effects, etc.) – while tutorials can be useful, I’ve observed the importance of just freely exploring a software’s capabilities. For example; in regards to After Effects, the king of tutorial makers is Andrew Kramer of ‘Video Copilot’ – in his tutorials he provides step by step instructions to complete certain effects HOWEVER, he also encourages experimentation with the ideas and techniques he teaches. I think by doing this you can avoid creating products that appear to be straight copies of a tutorial and instead you can develop your own personal design/editing style.
While I’d consider myself to be reasonably competent in using Premiere, in yesterday’s class I discovered a few interesting effects and settings which I’ll now keep in mind for later projects where they may come in use. This is why I think it’s important to spend time just messing about in editing programs; you can discover an awful lot just through trial & error and a bit of experimentation.
Here is a short sample of one of my experiments (using our abstract footage) where I tested out different transition effects: