Responsive: Dazed - Stop Motion Post Production

As Katy and Molly began production on the edited footage, I got to work on the post production of the stop motion. As I mentioned before, the levels of the frames are off due to us not taking more care when setting up our equipment, meaning I had a lot of work to do before I could say it was finished. 

Mike had suggested that I edit the levels frame by frame in Photoshop, which I did however I couldn't achieve the consistency that we wanted through this method. I also found that it was extremely time consuming, which is something that we couldn't really afford as the deadline was only 3 weeks away at this point. I was also struggling with the file size due to there being so many frames. 

This led me to attempt to fix the issue in After Effects, as this would give me the ability to alter them frame by frame. Although I had to alter the levels frame by frame and key frame almost every frame, I found that I was able to achieve much more consistency than when I attempted it in Photoshop, it was also a lot less time consuming. Having said this, there was still a flickering of colour however, it wasn't as noticeable. If I had more time I would have put a lot more time into making the levels as consistent as possible. Despite this however, I feel that the levels have turned out quite well considering there were some huge level jumps on certain frames. 

Adjusting Levels in After Effects

In terms of attempting to fix the jumpiness of our footage, I tried out the motion stabiliser in After Effects to see how this would effect the footage. This was something that I had never used before so I didn't know what to expect from using it. A lot of this was done by experimenting, as i was new to it, but I found that the motion tracker worked better when placed on an area of the footage that had high contrast so I tried to focus on these areas when I was placing the tracking points.

Position of Motion Tracker

Position of Motion Tracker

As the footage was separated into 5 different clips I had to place the trackers in different places to achieve the best possible outcome. After I'd done this to the first clip I played the footage back and showed Katy and Molly, as I was struggling to see much of a difference between the two as I had been staring at it for quite a while.
Although the motion track stabilised the jumpiness slightly, it didn't have all that much of an effect on the overall footage. However, I felt this had something to do with where I was placing the trackers, so I attempted it again but with the trackers in different places. This seemed to work a lot better, so I used the motion stabiliser on the remaining footage too. 

Footage before Motion Stabiliser

Footage after Motion Stabiliser

Once all of the clips were done and I had edited them together I watched it through and decided that it would be worth altering the position of some of the frames that weren't stabilised enough with the trackers. This was a simple task of key framing the position of the frames where I felt it was necessary. 

Altering position key frames

The overall effect seems to work in our favour and I feel that I have managed to fix the issues we had with the footage to a high enough standard to use for our submission. I also feel that I have learnt a lot in terms of how deal with footage that isn't 'perfect' and I have improved on my post production skills. However, this isn't to say that I realise the importance of getting the footage as 'perfect' as possible whilst shooting, as it makes it easier to work with in post production. 

To complete the video, I put the footage to a soundtrack in Premiere and also added the Dazed Media logo. We are happy with how this turned out and glad that I was able to edit the footage we had to create something that would fit with the rest of our footage and with our ideas.

The 'Face'