Explorations

Intro

Our final project at Freestyle as a Junior was to pursue a topic that we were passionate about. Because I am interested in the visual effects, I wanted to teach myself how to make interesting mask effects in Premiere Pro. I’ve watched videos and movies and seen effects they use in a manipulated way to have a cinematic effect so I wanted to see if I could do it too. I used Premiere Pro in order to mask out and overlay clips that I had taken on my camera. In the end, I realized that a few small changes to the mask can make a big difference in the realism of your footage.

Production

The first step was to film footage that I could mask and create effects. Then, I imported all of the clips into Adobe Premiere Pro. I decided that I wanted to make a compliation style film, using the all of the finished products. In order to make my clips more realistic, I did some research about editing styles that would give my footage look the best. First, I used some tutorials by Cinecom to show me how to create the basic effects. Then, I added some other effect to make it my own.

Here is an example of my work.

Infographic

For my infographic, I decided to show the history of visual effects. They are all displayed on a timeline and their dates are beneath. On top, I created the title and then figured out the color scheme. I included movies such as Star Wars, Avatar, Lord of the Rings and more. I wanted to keep my graphic simple and easy to read so that it is accessible for all creators.

Reflection

Throughout this process, I have learned a lot about myself and my interests regarding cinematography. I had always admired watching movies and youtube videos with super cinematic shots, specifically the use of LUTs and color grading from apps like Premiere Pro. Because I am taking film next year at Freestyle, I thought it would be smart to practice using Premiere in order to gain a comfortability that would be useful for my endeavors next year.

By using masks and making sure i got my beginning footage correct, I realized how easy it was to take an okay shot and make it look incredible. Everyone I showed told me that the edited clip looked so real and that they wanted to learn how to do it as well. As visual effects is something that I am very interested in and just beginning to explore, I felt that this project taught me that anything is possible to achieve when you set your mind to it. I probably watched over a few hours of youtube videos looking for tutorials about how to make mask effects.

Once I started playing around in Premiere, I noticed that it was easy to manipulate masks in order to completely change the effect of the clip. For example, in my one edited clip of the car driving over me, I used masks to make it look like the car was on top of me, when it was really two different shots. I personally did not know the capabilities I had when it came to effects, but now I know for sure I will use my skills in the future to achieve my satisfaction in Visual Effects.