As I was reviewing the footage I had shot during my 2nd ‘Car Mounted Camera’ experiment, one of the shots I had filmed suddenly reminded me of something I used to do as a kid. When my family would be driving during the night I’d always be in the back seat looking up at the street lights, blurring my eyes and seeing how I could play with the lights as we drove past. I decided that it’d be interesting to experiment with this a few ideas based on this childhood habit and this was the final result.
I’m pretty happy with how this audio/visual editing experiment worked out, and I learned a bit more about Premiere’s masking settings – this allowed me to composite the multiple shots of different street lights together into one flowing and never ending piece. When it came to editing, I initially thought that I was going to have to use AfterEffects to combine the multiple different shots, however the darkness of the night really helped me out when it came to masking out certain sections of each shot and I was able to accomplish the effect 100% within Premiere.
I think I’ve achieved a somewhat surreal result, and the weird synth-based music definitely helps out in the ‘making strange’ department. I’ve found that this style of music works quite well when it comes to creating a strange and unusual night-based video (more on that in another post). When it came to colour grading I wasn’t too concerned with achieving too much of a realistic image, and instead I experimented around with a few different ‘curves’ and colour wheel based effects.
I really like how this video came together, and I’m also quite pleased with how the idea actually came into being – by reflecting upon the footage I’d shot and developing my ideas from those reflections. I think the fact that I hadn’t planned to create this video while I was shooting this footage is really exciting from a creative standpoint and it certainly demonstrates more of the Film3 ‘method’ – blurring the lines between pre-production, production, and post-production.