Hello Friends,
(Leah here) October was been gorgeous in Colorado. Every day a cloudless blue sky, with a breeze swirling yellow leaves around (at least that's what appears to be going on in the small view out the window well).
Elijah's been in a Sync Licensing workshop, making music and kicking ass at this magical place in Fort Collins called The Music District. And I've been developing my new grandpa fashion style and looking at glasses online even though I don't wear glasses. I have nothing to prove, but this shows that I have actually gone outside this fall:
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In this art journal we take you into the creation of Evergreen, the music video. It's an appropriate time to talk about it, too, because we received this exciting news in October:
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We won best music video at this film festival! |
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So, let's get into it! We alternate as we talk through the process from start to finish.
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L: After we decided our next music video would be for Evergreen, it took me months to visualize a direction to take it. What I kept coming back to was the feeling of a road trip, forward motion, a song on the radio, the prairie, to foothills, to mountain views we see when we drive into the Rockies. This took me into new video territory… how do I make a moving collage? I wanted it to scroll across the screen and depict a changing landscape, even changing seasons. I initially wanted to have a car, a gold Previa to be exact, in the foreground, moving forward. We even had the idea to put all 3 of the Leijah.Art band members (at the time) in the moving van cutout… That got really complicated, so that was the first idea to go, although I still have the multiple cutouts of old gold Previas for sentimental reasons.
To keep me on track as I put this long collage together, I made a storyboard of sorts which contained all the magazine cutouts I wanted to use from beginning to end:
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I set up the camera above my table and found a big roll of crappy craft paper:
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E: The video for Evergreen was Leah’s vision. I considered her the director of Evergreen. She wanted to make a video that scrolled from left to right that seemed like an endless scroll.
The entire piece is actually on one large piece of paper. But because we don’t own a fancy train track (for the camera) that can follow Leah down a 15 foot hallway with elaborate lighting systems, everything was shot on her desk.
After Leah completed a section, she would stop recording and then move the sheet of paper over or rip it off, putting the end of the old section on her right, taping it down and then building directly off of what she had just finished.
Leah then gave me the footage and I began to attempt to stitch the various cuts together. You can see the spots where the transitions occur if you look closely (like the green and yellow grass seam at :54).
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L: I did all the art upside down because I thought we would add in the car later digitally and couldn’t have my arms in the way. Turns out I didn’t have to do that, but I’m happy I did.
It was a tedious process, but I decided to be improvisational and free about it, not overthinking, not trying to make each section a completed or perfect piece.
E: We had done a couple practice runs to see if that was the best way for us to build the composites. I remember something we had initially practiced made sense in our head and the first test run, and then later it didn’t make any sense and we had to start completely over.
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Stitching the shots together was initially very tedious in Final Cut. I essentially put the layers next to each other and then used keyframes to try to make the shots look as if they were scrolling together.
It was awful.
Awful…
Final Cut is not very friendly when it comes to keyframes.
I eventually figured out that the best practice was to place the shots next to each other and then make them a separate compound clip, and then using keyframes to scroll made the stitches seamless, and way less tedious.
Leah shot the video wide, so we were able to zoom in and then scroll within the zooms.
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After I glued all the transitions together in Final Cut our initial plan was to bring a gold Toyota Previa on a road trip through all the landscapes. We tried a few different experiments with it, and found it just wasn’t working, so we dropped the idea.
Now we see gold Previas around town and we just bask in knowing that we love them, and no one else really knows why.
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L: I helped through the whole process, but my main work was done after I handed the art footage off to Elijah. I really enjoyed finding videos to composite into the scenery I had made, like the moving grasses, birds, grazing elk, and fish. Gathering these videos is a really fun part of the video compositing process for me, but I need help knowing when to stop! We used a couple stock footage websites, so the possibilities were wide.
Once we added the moving grass into the first scene I made, we flipped out in excitement… kind of like we do every time we composite a video into a still piece of art. It is magic. This is definitely our medium.
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E: The compositing came next and it was so much fucking fun!
We took a compositing class back in February 2020 which taught us how to lay video on top of other video. This was our very first attempt at it:
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L: As exciting as compositing is, it can also be tedious. There are specifications required for a good, composite-worthy video: needs to be from one vantage point and stable (on a tripod), needs similar colors to still image or a simple, solid background, and it needs to be long enough so looping isn't needed. We have to carefully blend the new video into the art so as to not obstruct it, while also making sure the footage is clear and crisp. At times when I was making the art piece, the table shook, which meant we had to key frame the new video to move with the shaking footage in order to make it look natural (this happened with the elk footage, Ben did the intricate work of matching that video to the shaking of the table! wow).
We also had to figure out how to put the composited videos underneath my arms/hands. To do this, we duplicated the original scene, cut out my hand and arm frame by frame, called rotoscoping, then set that on top of everything, matching it with the movements of the original footage… ugh just trying to explain that is tiring… the actual work is just as ridiculous.
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Hot Air Balloons
L: I was excited to find the balloons in a National Geographic photo, knowing they would add a whimsical and unexpected element. After we ditched the idea of adding a car through all the scenes, we still wanted something the viewer could follow, so the balloons became something to animate throughout the piece. For fun, I wanted to make my little stop motion animation, so that’s what you see when they first start moving. I moved the cutouts by hand and we edited my hands out in Final Cut to make them move on their own. But stop motion takes a long time and we ultimately wanted smooth animation to make the scenes more realistic.
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So I scanned the balloons, edited them in Photoshop, and made them separate files. We added the files into Final Cut and placed them over the balloons in the footage. We removed the original analog balloons digitally which left the digital versions in their place. Then we used a tool called key framing to move the balloons around the scenes smoothly.
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The Lighthouse
E: One of the scenes we struggled with the most while compositing was the lighthouse scene at 2:52. There was something striking about the mountains blending into the lighthouse then into the ocean, and we really wanted to make it stand out. I think I remade this scene at least 15 times. I was the excited kid showing Leah what I made the night before, only to have her give dreadful disapproval, putting me in my shame closet for the day (jk of course).
There was a happy surprise that happened that led to everything else: When Leah’s paintbrush started painting, suddenly she was painting the moving fish into the scene. At first I had no idea why it was working, and didn’t touch it for fear that it was a glitch. Eventually I realized that it was transparent enough that you can’t really see the video on the white, but when Leah added color it gave the video enough of a background to make it stand out, the result was it looking like she was painting the video onto the screen.
Using that as an inspiration for the scene we thought it would be fun to treat the brush as a magic wand that made everything come alive.
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The scene on the left side with the canoe rowing is a funny story. We were using our mac mini to edit the video and it was working really well because Final Cut is Apple software, and the new processor on these new mac minis is Apple made, so they work seamlessly together. The software we use for rotoscoping, however, is Adobe After Effects, and anytime we tried to run After Effects on the new mac it would completely crash. I pulled out my 2014 macbook pro and tried to rotoscope the canoe rower out of the stock footage and when I started the process my computer froze, like spinning beachball of death frozen, I left it alone for a couple hours because I had an errand to run, and when I came back I saw that it was 7% done rotoscoping, instead of the 4% when I had left. Instead of manually shutting the computer down, I just let it do its thing. 5 days of a frozen computer (I couldn't do anything else on it) with an inching progress bar left us with a pretty solid rotoscope of a person canoeing up a waterway.
It’s funny now considering how short of a scene it was. The sacrifices we make for our art.
Looking at that scene today, I would still make different choices, but it is one that still stands out to me as an accomplishment.
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The Ending
L: When I was initially story boarding, I couldn't nail down the ending. We wanted something more climactic than what we had already done, but really struggled to think of something. This is partially why the whole process took longer than expected. Then, Ben gave us the idea to eventually stop scrolling sideways and start to move inward. This was the answer. The art I made ended with a moon and stars and planets, so we figured a zoom into space would be a good climax for the end. And then of course we wanted to bring back our hot air balloons as if they’d been following the viewer on their journey. To further surprise (and confuse) the viewer, Elijah added in the jellyfish which, like the balloons, echoed the song’s unexpected key change at the very end.
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We are profoundly proud of Evergreen and see that it’s just the beginning of what we want to make.
And here it is (again for you, perhaps). A hand to hold as we lean into the inevitable, uncomfortable changes of life:
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Thank you so much for supporting our art!
Love,
Leah and Elijah
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