Creating my Dance Edit (Attempt 1)

When it came to editing the footage I first wanted to review it all and go through selecting my favourite shots and any shots I thought would be particularly useful. I also went through whilst reviewing certain clips and gave them better in and out points which lost all the useless footage in the clip so when I put it onto the timeline it was just the useful footage and just the parts I wanted.

Before I came to putting things on my timeline I wanted to formulate a plan so I went back to my inspirational videos and decided that the style of  'Pas de deux' by Norman McLaren was the video which most interested me in terms of style (https://www.nfb.ca/film/pas_de_deux_en). I just really liked the use of overlays and opacity to blend two images together. It also repeated the same movements a lot of times to highlight the shapes created and this also added importance to certain parts as well. I decided my the plan for my edit would be to try to attempt an abstract styled piece using similar techniques to 'Pas de deux' however I will keep the dance in order to try and keep a certain sense of continuity.

I made this first edit by inserting my chosen clips in dance order onto my timeline. I kept one continuous shot of the full dance as my main shot and also a guideline then had all other shots I liked and wanted to use layered on top as well which meant using video lines 1 and 2 on the timeline. Then I had to start playing with the opacity controls to create the desired effect I wanted. If you select the clip you want to edit on your timeline and then go on to the effect control tab in the top left window you will see the opacity option shown below:

What I did is put the opacity down so that the other clip on the other video line would come through on the image too as if they were blended together. I had to do different opacity's for each clip as each had slightly different lighting but I found it was generally around the 35% area. I also experimented with the blend mode in some clips too however they looked out of place so I took this away and kept them all the same. What I could also do with this opacity option is have the clips fading in and out of one another so that there wasn't a sudden in and out for each clip and instead it was gentle. I did this by adding a key marker at the beginning put the opacity to 0% here. I then put as key marker where I wanted the clip to be fully faded up by and raised the percentage of opacity to whatever was required. If it was a straight forward fade up the opacity would just be put to 100% on the second key marker. This process is the same but reversed when doing a fade out. Overall I found this to be a really useful tool to create some really interesting effects. When I was happy with the whole edit I decided to find some music that would fit with it. I already knew a musician who works in London runs a label under the name B Rec. I contacted him and told him what the project was and he sent me some different music tracks over Sound Cloud which he thought may be appropriate. I listened to them all and found the one which I thought fitted the best and added this to my edit. The song I chose is 'Back to One' by False Idols. Once this song was synced in with my edit I exported my finished piece. Here it is:


Dance Edit One from Billie Williams on Vimeo.

I really liked the abstract effect the opacity experimentation caused but I knew after reviewing it that there was lots more room for improvement.