I recently finished up a music video featuring Tori Amos and her wonderful song, "Bouncing Off Clouds." The only problem I really came across was removing the tracking markers in the background. I spent over half of the semester trying to work with Apple's Color software. The software didn't seem to cooperate with what I wanted to do, so I then resorted to various methods of research. I aspired to find different ways to get rid of the markers, but never found a thorough way of doing so. Therefore, I then decided to just go with the editing abilities I had available through Final Cut.
The first step I took in editing the video was create a multi-clip in Final Cut Pro. I created the multiclip and ran a few rough cuts of which shots of Tori I liked in certain time frames. I ran through quite a few of these cuts until I really grasped onto one. I also had to fool around with the chroma-keyer in order to get a good amount of the green screen out of the screen shots. This was a very difficult process. It worked for the most part, but even using the color corrector didn't remove every single trace. So what I did was sometimes soften her image and make her more transparent which worked really well.
There were some points in the video where I blocked off some bigger tracking markers on the side of Tori's head. One may notice that some of her images appear more transparent than the others due to my tweaking in the "edge feather" feature in FCP. I felt that this worked better than having a repetitive flow of images including any trace of those markers. Although some shots (especially the ones where Tori is stradling between two keyboards) may include the markers, it still works because the markers would sometimes reveal themselves as stars in the sky. Also, one might notice how subtle they are in some points because of the whites in the clouds imagery. It took a lot of time simply keying out the green screen and attempting to avoid any green of spilling through. In Final Cut Pro, I even tried using a spill suppressor to fine tune the green off of the edges of Tori's hair.
It was quite a process making sure that the green wouldn't bleed into the background I wanted portrayed. In some shots, some green spill would have been okay whereas in others it wouldn't work. For example, the mintish green sky background and then ending tunnel imagery could've survived some of the spill whereas it wouldn't have looked appealing spilling through the VideoTrakk footage and cloudy sky imagery. I think that the video works as a whole, but I'm not necessarily sure that the themes I wanted to convey stretch into the mind of the audience. Although there really is no "right" or "wrong" answer here, there is a significance in the sense that the audience needs to be left with a feeling. I believe that most of my audience may be impacted or inspired by the techniques I used in creating this video, but I'm not sure that they will get the same meaning out of the song that I do. The beauty of all of this is that it doesn't matter if it makes sense or not to the audience. The importance here is that when one expresses themselves in a visually creative sense, whatever they portray is their own. Hence, an audience can receive various perceptions from the music's visual styles and how they move to the music.
In the earlier process, one of the things that bothered me was that I finally realized that the video I wanted to produce was indeed something that would need to be taken into further software. For example, I originally wanted to include a movement of flowers growing out of Tori's piano. I wanted to create the idea that although nature is sometimes forgotten, a state of one's mind can bring them back to that innocent state of mind. I virtually wanted this once lost world to grow onto the city streets and take over the whole idea that one is so caught up in their stressed and busy lives. In this sense, Tori would be shifting through the dimensions of the unconscious while encountering not only bodily, but worldly changes. Hence, the world is in fact changes back to one that she once knew or finds again. I spent a lot of late nights and full days just trying to learn more editing techniques and become more familiar with Final Cut's features. There were many hours spent in the process of creating this final product and I hope that it shows through. I truly had a blast working on this video as it shows me just how much work people do to create a work of artistic expression through video.
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