For the post production, I knew I wanted to focus a lot on color correcting and grading. I was really happy with the final results. Each segment of the music video has its own distinct style and I wanted the color to reflect that. In editing, everything went mostly as expected except for a couple of things.

For one, there is a time lapse shot in the music video, where there was a party being time lapsed, but I had to comp Ryan into the shot moving at normal speed. I thought the process would be pretty straight forward. We purposely lined up the shots so that the composition was identical. I made a rough mask around Ryan and keyframed it throughout the shot, but I noticed that when people would come near Ryan, they would cast a shadow on the wall and reveal the seams of the mask. So I went back in and did a frame-by-frame keyframed mask to adhere closely to Ryan’s head. That still gave me issues as it was nearly impossible to perfectly mask Ryan’s head in every single frame in the time that I had. My solution was to make a mask that went up the entire frame, essentially just splitting the screen into thirds. This solved the problem as now shadows were not being cast up on the walls and the seams of the frame were nearly invisible. A little frustrating given that this could have saved me hours if I had just done it that way in the first place.

The other smaller issue was the sound in the first scene. I recorded the puppet’s dialogue in the audio suite in Cass. The struggle was making it match the quality of Ryan’s voice which was captured on the day. On top of that, the room tone we had captured at the beach was corrupted, so I had to ask Rose to let me use the room tone we captured at a different beach for her thesis film. In all, I think it turned out very well, and the issues that I still have with it are minor enough not to be noticed.