Can someone PLEASE get me some bubblewrap?!

 

Not to be dramatic or anything... but I JUST CAN'T TODAY. I think I am going through some kind of block because I just spent the past 6 hours editing a 2 SECOND CLIP. I know what you are thinking- she is probably exaggerating- but I am not. 

I started editing this clip at around 1:20 PM and it is now it is 7:30. The clip is a total of 2 seconds and 1 millisecond long. I honestly don't know what to do at this point. It is like I have hit a wall and I just can't seem to get over it. I have been animating, editing, and drawing for days and I think this is my brains way of telling me I need to stop. Too bad I got the hint 3 attempts and 6 hours too late. The frustration and overall impatience today have been so overwhelming which just makes it harder to get in a creative mood.

It all started with a clip which I had not storyboarded well enough. I had planned to re-create a repeated freeze-frame effect that I had seen in another music video I recently watched so instead of planning out the scene like a normal, logical person, I just kind of drew the camera movement and composition vision onto the paper- with no knowledge of how to make the effect- and wrote the name of the inspirational music video to remind myself. I just thought future me would figure it out and know what I was getting at. Turns out future me did not. We took the shot 3 times and in the editing phase I realized each take got progressively worse. The subject's movement was awkward and her face was way off-tone. If this was a full-scale production, this would be the first reshoot; It was almost unusable footage.

I decided to soldier on and see if the whimsical, psychedelic effects might distract from all of the mistakes with the take so I got to researching. It took forever to find a method to create this look since I was reverse engineering the process from the video and there weren't any YouTube tutorials on the exact effect. I ended up finding an unrelated tutorial that helped me figure out what I needed. Turns out the effect is extremely time consuming and meticulous. It took more than two hours to put it together and the effect itself looked cool, but the issues I mentioned before remained. It just did not visually attract me. It was terrible.

Attempt #1

2.5 hours later and this is all  have! This is the direct proof that more work does not necessarily mean better results. But, I didn't have any footage to replace this piece- I looked for any way I could just cut this shot and couldn't find anything. I decided that coloring the picture in could hide the goofy expression and awkward hands. 


Attempt #2 + 3

So... tinting/coloring the picture didn't work either. I went through so many color combinations but I only exported the two above. My mom and sister told me it was much better and to just move on, but the colors made me hate it even more since it just looked unnatural with the other shots in the music video.

I remembered this really cool scene I had watched in the music video of the photo below where they put the actor in a green morph suit to make it seem like a 'star man' was dancing with the artist.

(Why- The Big Moon)

Since I was only dealing with one person, I knew that I could use her silhouette as an alpha clipping mask/ track matte and fill her face and torso with stars, eliminating both of my problems. I was finally able to get something decent!

This picture is not the best representation of what it looks like, but it looks so good in movement!

I am going to take a day of editing I think because it is getting really difficult to even come up with cool ideas and problem solve :(  Maybe i'll try to get the social media part started.