Changes to my Work

I received some really good feedback on this project from my tutor, and there were only a couple of things that needed improvement, mainly to do with the effects. It was decided that the split screens in the first routine didn't really work because they were so random, and the freeze frame effect didn't work with just a single frame. With this feedback I went back to the After Effects projects and started to work on the changes. I took the split screens out altogether and replaced them with a fast cut between the two dancers, which looked 100 times better. I also returned to the freeze frame work and added more frames to each sequence so that there was more of a flow to the effect, and this made it work much better. I also added another sequence of freeze frames during one of the spins after some feedback from my family, who said that the effect would work well with the spin sequence, which it did!

 As well as improving the effects I already had, there were a couple of things that my tutor suggested I added to the piece. One of them was another slow motion shot. He really liked the slow motion shots that I already had in the sequence so I decided I would go right back to the first edit and see if there were any other good slow motion shots that I could put in. There was one that is actually one of my favourites shots of the entire shoot (I don't know why I didn't put it in the first time round!) Anyway I added that to the sequence and rejigged some of the cuts to make it fit. I am really glad I did this because it adds more drama to the routine.

The second thing I looked into adding was a transition that comes from taking a shot where a dancer moves across the screen and masking the back of her out, then key framing this mask and moving it along to cut out the back of the dancer for the entire shot. This then makes it looks as though the dancer is dancing in front of the next shot and it is revealed as she moves along. I wasn't sure whether there were any instances in the edit where this type of shot would appear and whether I would be able to do the effect or not but I tried it out and it worked really well for one shot. I have only used it once but I hope that it is still effective.

Once I had completed all of these new and improved effects, I used the Magic Bullet grading package to see if there were any good grading looks that would work for the routines. I found two for the routines that were very different but work together, so I added these which gave the whole video a more professional look.

With all of the changes made I put the new footage back into the Premiere Pro file and stitched everything back together and did the final renders.