(upbeat symphony music)
(rewind wails)
(head knocking against desk)
(upbeat funky music)
- Let's be honest, we've all had off days.
Pray you never have a day like this.
So, this was a wedding two
years ago of my two friends.
They hired a photo and video team,
and for whatever reason, the video side
of things just didn't pan out.
Footage they got didn't match up with
what we all witnessed that day,
and obviously my friends are bummed out
and considered the footage unsalvageable.
Challenge accepted.
So, I suffer from hopeless optimism here.
People who think the shoot is over
and we got what we got
lack one of the following
three things: vision, resources, or time.
That's true for almost any format:
weddings, films, or even YouTube episodes.
How do we actually fix this?
We have 75% of the footage in such
a degraded state that
including it in the video
would actually take away
from the focal point.
So, let's cut a
significantly shorter video
and just use the best
shots and build from there.
This is not looking great,
out of the four cameras,
the only gimbal we have was an osmo,
but it had some sort of malfunction
with the memory card, and
that's what the pixelation is.
We have no B roll, we have no drone shots,
most of the other cameras were all shot
on a wide lens, so
they're about as cinematic
as a congressional
hearing, and the only shot
of the bride and the groom
at the alter favored the
groom's side, so we have almost
no beauty shot of the bride.
We have to build the
story from the ground up.
So, let's start small,
basic relatable emotions.
That's the easiest way to get an
audience invested into your story.
Here's a great shot.
Michael is waiting around for first look.
He's glancing around at his feet.
He takes a big sigh, I think
we can all relate to that.
Now, to make these shots actually work,
we have to slow down this footage,
and of course, they
didn't shoot any slow mo.
I'm gonna use Twixtor, I find the results
are a little bit better,
but obviously Premiere
and Final Cut have their
own proprietary form
of optical flow, so if
you have that, use that.
Now, we've extracted that moment,
let's move on and do
this a dozen more times.
(slow piano music)
We are so fucked here, out
of an hour and 35 minutes
of raw footage, we have six
minutes of usable footage
that's not pixelated or overexposed.
We have no story.
What other footage do I have?
Okay, so I got one lifeline here.
I brought my camera that
day, and I got a few shots
of them just messing around
in front of the classic car
and on top the building in downtown.
It's not much, but at least it's gorgeous,
and maybe it'll help
generate some ideas on story.
Do have a drone shot from a
short film three years ago.
It has nothing to do with the wedding,
but it's of downtown LA,
see what we're missing
is a ton of B roll and exposition.
So, that is what stock footage is for.
We're not gonna use any
sort of romantic shots
cause I think that
would offend my friends,
but what we can get away with are
super tight cinematic B roll shots.
Michael was wearing a blue suit,
so I think I'll start with that.
You can vastly improve the
overall perceived quality
of a film by loading the
most cinematic shots first
and then hooking the audience with story.
As the story unfolds, they're less
likely to notice a drop in quality.
Okay, so this is a great shot right here.
It's super cinematic, it's mysterious.
We can't really tell it's not her.
So, let's find a few more shots like this.
Next, let's download the watermark comps,
plug them into our
timeline, and then we'll
buy the ones that make the final cut.
So, I'm using Dissolve for these shots,
but I left a bunch of the other stock
footage sites in the description.
Dissolve did not pay me to say
this, I am loyal to nobody.
Check this out.
The story doesn't have
to be told linearly.
So, three years ago, I filmed
Michael's proposal to Chelsea.
Now, it's not great, I
didn't have a gimbal,
but I was rolling video when they thought
I was taking photos, so what you have
is some super private
moments between the two.
(hands smack together)
I just ripped my shirt.
Okay, so we got something here.
So, in addition to building some emotion,
we can use this as a time-travel device,
so we can go back and
forth to past and present,
and now all of a sudden, using
multiple narrative timeline,
we have a two shot of the ceremony
as well as a smiling shot of the bride.
Now, if you don't have
this kind of footage,
what other footage do you have?
Any photos or videos from Facebook?
We just don't have enough B roll still.
(clock ticking)
All right, so we're here
back at the wedding venue,
and I know it doesn't look
light a venue right now,
it looks like a college campus.
All we need is just a
couple of moments of awesome
cinematic B roll stuff that
we can cut together with them.
It's gonna give us that atmospheric tone
that is completely void
of the original video.
(upbeat funky music)
It's amazing, there's two butterflies
that are making love in the garden.
Ah, ah, ah, there they go.
(upbeat sultry music)
So, the alter looks a little bit
different than the way we remember it.
There's a caution sign,
and someone's sleeping
on the benches, but maybe
we can shoot around it.
(upbeat sultry music)
Let's go home, let's go plug this stuff
into the edit and see where we're left.
Okay, by itself, it's
just a bunch of footage
of flowers and walkways
and will cut nicely
with our wedding footage, but we can start
building meaning and emotion through
a mental phenomenon called
the Kuleshov Effect.
Okay, so back in like 1910, Kuleshov,
a Soviet filmmaker,
famously published a montage
of unrelated clips, which
could derive multiple meanings
from the same clip of
an unexpressionless man
by changing the clips that followed.
This was later more famously expanded upon
by Alfred Hitchcock,
and history lesson over.
So, let's jump in our timeline here.
We have four clips,
okay so, the first clip
is of Michael and Chelsea, this was
shot on the day of the proposal.
The second one, the
videographer shot on the day
of the wedding, it's a
little bit blown out,
but because it's artistic, I
think we can get away with it.
The third one is Dissolve stock footage.
It looks like it's a ring inside of a box.
The fourth one is a flower
that we just shot at the venue.
So, let's rearrange
the order a little bit,
and let's see what we're
able to distill out of this.
(poignant slow piano music)
All right ready, one, two...
(flash whining)
(poignant slow piano music)
That song works, it's great,
it's just not really their personality.
So, let's take a deep dive
into royalty-free music,
and see if we can find anything.
Two sites I use are Artlist.io
and Epidemic Sound,
let's see what they got.
So, because we don't
have any audible speeches
or vows to cut to, I'm
actually thinking a song
with lyrics might help
us tell their story.
There is one song that comes to mind.
It just so happens to be an
Academy Award-winning song,
which I definitely don't
have the rights to,
but I did do a test, uploaded
it to my YouTube channel,
and it turns out, Sony
Music Entertainment,
the right holders, don't
have any issue with me
using the song as long as I
don't monetize the episode.
Totally fine with me, I
don't monetize the channel.
We are finally ready
to edit, let's time out
some of these shots to
music, build on some of those
intimate moments that we captured,
and see if we can recreate
some of the magic.
So, we can't recover some of
these blown-out highlights,
but what we can do is add a layer on top
and then change the opacity
to screen or overlay.
It looks a little more dreamy,
it looks intended, and it
hides the overexposed shot.
Okay, so this last little tool
we can use is called guiding the audience.
So, I slapped on a film grain to this
proposal footage, and
it just makes it obvious
that it's a callback to a prior time.
This technique led me to an idea on how
I can save some of that pixelated footage.
(upbeat funky music)
All right, I think we're done here.
You guys ready to see what we made?
- [Narrator] To the seekers
of things which are one
of a kind, the authentic,
the rare, the hard to define.
(quiet guitar music)
♪ Oh to see without my eyes ♪
♪ The first time that you kissed me ♪
♪ Boundless by the time I cried ♪
♪ I built your walls around me ♪
♪ White noise, what an awful sound ♪
♪ Fumbling by Rogue River ♪
♪ Feel my feet above the ground ♪
♪ Hand of God, deliver me ♪
♪ Oh, oh woe-oh-woe is me ♪
♪ The first time that you touched me ♪
♪ Oh, will wonders ever cease? ♪
♪ Blessed be the mystery of love ♪
♪ Of love ♪
(car engine rumbling)
(quiet guitar music)
♪ Blessed be the mystery of love ♪
(quiet guitar music)
- So, I'm gonna play
around with this some more.
Voice-over work can get a
little campy if you overdo it,
but it's all kinda subjective from here.
I think we created something magical.
Can't wait to show my friends.
If you have found this episode helpful,
blow up that Like button, or if you have
any specific questions,
be sure to check out
the description for my footnotes
or just drop me a comment.
This is Josh Yeo saying
thank you very much,
stay creative, and go make some art.
(upbeat funky music)
