Lab Goal
We’ll work with Premiere a little more this week. I’ll give you a set of assets to work with, and you will need to do a little editing, then balance the color and audio.
I know it’s midterms right now, so this lab is intentionally a little lighter than normal to give you a little more flex time for your other classes.
Lab Materials
Please download the assets at {this link}, then import them into a new Premiere project. This link will take you to a OneDrive folder with the following assets:
- YouTube Clips
- GladOS lines from Portal 2
- Two clips from Short Circuit 2 (Johnny 5’s introduction, and one fight scene)
- One clip from Short Circuit 1 (DISASSEMBLE!)
- Music tracks
- New Romantic: Lo-fi, guitar heavy, sort of like if Ed Sheeran tried to cover Paranoid Android
- Romantic Girl: 60s garage pop
- Romantic Tuesday: Short piano track, reminds me of the Verve
- romantic nit: Electronic, 8-bit
- Romantic: Experimental, lo-fi, electronic
Lab Procedure
I made some last minute adjustments after our technical difficulties the last two weeks. Rather than give you one video with a lot of editing needs, I’m trying a different approach. I’ve given you several video clips and some audio assets, and I’d like to ask you to create a movie trailer. I feel like the story of gladOS and Johnny 5 would make a great, summer Romantic Comedy, but that’s probably not the only way you could take this.
Import the assets provided above, then get to work! I won’t provide a set of steps to follow, but I will ask you to accomplish the following list of things.
- Cutting: The videos are clip compilations to begin with. A good first step in cases like this is to watch through them (remember to press L to increase playback speed!) and insert cuts where appropriate.
- Lighting/color: The video game and the movie clips have drastically different lighting. Sometimes, this will play in your favor, since you can really identify the nature of the two characters. But, you may need to lighten or darken some scenes (or even just aspects of some scenes!) to get the effect you want.
- Change Color will let you use the eyedropper in the effect tool to select one color from your clip and change it using the Hue/Lightness/Saturation settings. This is good if there is just one or two problematic spots, or if you want to turn your friend into an Orion.
- Leave Color works the same as Change Color, but it lets you pick one color in your clip and fade the rest towards black and white (like the red coat in Schindler’s List).
- Color Balance and Color Balance (HLS) lets you manipulate the various tones of each major color group (red, green, blue) in a clip.
- The Lumetri Color library is the most powerful color editing tool in Premiere, unless you buy additional tools. I recommend using the tools above before using Lumetri, as it includes the others.
- Audio: There are a lot of music tracks included here that you could layer underneath the video clips to create a solid throughline to your Rom Com preview (or preview from any other genre, I suppose). The audio will take a little balancing either way.
- Hey! There are a lot of audio effects in Premiere too! Too many to play with for this lab, really. Most are meant for music editing, and we can get by with the basic audio tools on the Effects panel.
- Keyframes: Where possible, you might want to use keyframes instead of cuts to trigger different effects coming in and out. This is also a good way to make effects fade in and out rather than abruptly start. Very useful if you want to line up a particular part of a music track with a moment in your trailer.
Beyond that, I’ve made sure to give you about 15 minutes of raw footage to edit, with about 10 minutes of really usable stuff. Even if you’re still figuring out Premiere, this should take less than our two-hour lab time.
Grading
This lab is graded out of 6 points (remember that the course is graded out of 100 points).
- Completion 4
Finishing the lab to its minimum expectations is worth 4 points. Colors should be balanced to something fairly normal looking, and there should not be any loud or distracting noises over what I’m saying.
- Quality 1
Creating a high quality product (one that could go in a professional portfolio) is worth 1 point.
- Doing some fancy editing or effects to make this video more interesting will definitely improve its quality.
- Tweaking the color or audio to make it sound professional rather than normal is a high-quality move.
- Technique 1
Using advanced or very precise techniques in creating your lab product is worth 1 point.
- Using a few simple transitions really well is a good technique to master.
- Adding text overlays at appropriate locations is an excellent technique to develop.
