i am begging to know your process if you are willing to tell… i’m so compelled by your art nobody does it like you do
hello anon thanks so much for this ask! i love talking about my process… also i assume youre talking about my edits (my illustration is pretty straight forward, either way) so ill go over that.
(warning: big post below the cut)
first things first, i use and recommend premiere pro as editing software. its free if you know where to look. anyways, my editing process is pretty easy to follow because i actually follow steps myself. these steps boil down to:
first, clipping from the source footage. second, timing and selecting clips (the bulk). third, refining clips. fourth, adding text. fifth, adding secondary decorations/final touches.
personally, i gather all of my clips myself instead of using scenepacks because, one, i didnt know they existed when i started editing and, two, now that i do, i prefer my method. i simply scrub through however much source footage i need to, looking for “action” (big movements, facial expressions, anything that catches the eye) and clipping the action i find. i usually do this concurrently with selecting clips because a lot of clips stay on the cutting room floor and i want my clips to reflect the emotion or lyrical content of the song snippet theyre set to. i keep all of my clips in a nested sequence in my premiere file for organization purposes.
timing and selecting clips is the fun part!! timing is based on whatever feels right to me and i usually create a rough layout of it before adding clips by using timeline markers. i also do sort of mini-syncs—where the clip doesnt change but theres still an element of timing happening—like timing the beginning of a movement to the beat of the song. as for selecting clips, i will go through the song section by section, based on my timing markers, and find clips from the bank ive created to fit those sections. again, i try to base this on emotion or lyrical content or, if neither apply, the fact that theres something interesting going on in the clip. something fun to do is to connect motion between different clips. this can take a ton of different forms but when you find an opportunity to do it its exciting.
refining clips means a lot of things. most source footage i pull from is in 16:9, and most of my edits are in 4:3 (personal choice, i find a tighter frame to be more visually interesting), so i have to crop my clips to fit that. for most of my edits i will also reposition my clips so that the subject of the footage is in the middle of the frame or as close to the middle of the frame as i can get it (if your subject is on the side of the frame, for example, there may not be enough space on that side of the frame to get that subject exactly to center). this is because (with hard cuts like i edit with) if you have the subject move within the frame between cuts, it takes a second for the viewer to find where the subject is again. this is detrimental in something as short and concentrated as an edit or fancam or whatever. thus, you want to keep the viewer’s eyes in one place, and i usually go with the middle. this step can also include color correction, which i pretty much wing. sometimes i have a specific vision—like in my ntbts “uh-oh” edit i wanted to have a high contrast, 2000s look so that was done in the color correction stage—but i usually dont.
text is easy, yet tedious, yet i still find it fun. for font selection i usually pick something based on the feel i want my edit to have. like impact for something punchy, etc. for ntbts specifically i also use fonts associated with the source material (i.e. cooper black and the ntbtstm handwriting font). ive actually made a custom font for an edit (see, my edit of joshua burge set to natalie by chance jones) because this step is so important to me. apart from this, text is all about timing and placement. i usually time text to syllables (instead of words or full lines) because the syllable count of a certain line in a song is usually more important to the rhythm of the song than the word count is. timing is finnicky—i usually scrub through the audio frame by frame finding the start of syllables so i can time everything correctly. (pro tip: don’t time the appearance of your text exactly to the frame where the sound starts. instead, align it to the frame after. i dont know if this actually does anything different for the viewer but it feels better to me personally lol). placement is pretty freeform for me and it at once informs and it informed by how i positioned my clips in the last step, with the primary rule being you shouldnt totally obscure too much of your subject. i often get around this by using different blending modes and making text translucent. also, final note, use the text tool in premiere (or your editing software of choice)! it can be a little frustrating and weird but it is infinitely better and more easy to edit in the future if youre unhappy with how something turned out than my previous method was. that previous method was manually creating all of my text assets in photoshop, exporting them as pngs, and then bringing them into premiere. its insane and inefficient and, for me, it made my text look bad. ok.
final touches are pretty haphazard for me, since i never go into an edit with all of my ideas for it fully formed. if it looks empty, ill add something to the borders to fill it up. if theres a brief instrumental section, ill try to make it a bit more interesting with icons showing up timed to the music, etc. i love drawing assets, and those are usually planned beforehand. the drawn assets in my ntbts edit set to egg and my ntbts edit set to uh-oh were drawn in flash, exported as pngs, and animated within premiere. the animated assets in my blackerry edit set to literal legend and my ntbts edit set to the azumanga daioh opening were animated in flash and imported into premiere.
finally you check that everything looks good and everything’s timed right and there’s no random frames of black or anything. then you export and post it to tumblr dot com.
sorry for the insane long ramble… have it again be noted i love talking about process. i unintentionally formatted this as a bit of a guide so i hope it can be helpful in that way. thank youuu for your interest if youve bore me long enough here
