How I EDIT a CINEMATIC TRAVEL VIDEO - Faces of NYC Breakdown

so one week ago I posted faces of NYC's the video I made after spending this entire summer in New York it's by far the most time I've ever put into a video and definitely the proudest I've been of something that I've made and it's gotten a great response so far and I really appreciate that from all of you among all of the nice things you guys have said about the video I've also received a lot of questions about it and requests for a video breaking it down so that's exactly what I'm gonna do today first I'm gonna show you kind of the before and after type breakdown where I have the final video over here on the right the original raw unedited footage over here on the left and then my timeline in premiere at the bottom of the frame and I've also made the music a good bit quieter so that the sound effects can kind of stand out a bit more and then after that we're gonna go through the entire timeline of the video just scrub through it and go through and kind of commentate it a bit for you and talk to you a bit about the stories behind some of the shots and sequences and just my thought process around organizing and executing the video yeah this is gonna be a pretty long one but I hope you enjoy it here we go almost everyone comes through New York but most visitors only catch a glimpse of it Airport lay overs and family vacations just aren't long enough to see this entire city in fact you probably couldn't see it in a lifetime because New York isn't one place it's like a shape with different faces each one unique from the rest and just when you think you know where you are you can turn a corner and find yourself somewhere [Music] we're Broadway crosses Fifth Avenue stands the Flatiron Building one of the first skyscrapers over three centuries a steady stream of men women and children followed the beacon of Liberty with this life in the very center of the city is a beautiful park a peaceful retreat from the turmoil of course nothing is 100% well I wouldn't go best wall street was luring the young and ambitious [Music] [Music] what was very unique about this shoot was I captured this footage on a 10-week long trip about two and a half months spent in New York as opposed to the usual one week that I would spend somewhere at the most creating a travel video like this so I had a huge variety of footage I knew it wouldn't be possible or do the city justice to try and take all of that footage and put it into one individual style try and kind of force all of this footage to look like one kind of look or vibe of the city so what I did was I broke it up into five different sequences with completely different styles and to give you a completely different vibe of the city that I experienced while I was there we start out with this daytime sequence to show the kind of grittier texture of the streets of New York that then moves into a moodier sequence to show some rainy scenes around Chinatown and Koreatown followed by this sequence in black and white that shows a lot of the historic places in New York the Flatiron the castle in Central Park places that have been around for hundreds of years that's followed up and contrasted by this very futuristic sequence that shows some newer kind of futuristic modern spots and buildings around New York and finally this sequence at the end that kind of just slows down and shows you how people in New York can get into nature a little bit within the city and kind of escape from the noise of the city I decided to make it super obvious that these were contrasting sequences by defining them by color so the first one is very orange then we go into that moody sequence and it's very dark and gray and cool colors then the sequence after that showing the historic spots is black and white completely different from anything else in the video the futuristic sequence is completely blue and finally that sequence at the end of the sunrise is very like pastel colorful imagery having the sequences look very dramatically different also came along with the challenge of transitioning between them so you can see in here I've used the Lightning a couple times to transition between sequences and also this color fade where I'm fading from color to black and white and then from black and white back to color to indicate a transition from one sequence to another so let's start out by taking a look at this intro and I wanted this to basically represent what I was talking about in the voiceovers you can see here we start outside of the city and then get closer through these shots they're kind of pushing in then going across the bridge then we've got this shot of the spinning cube and this shot is pretty special to me because it was in the East Village where I stayed for almost all of the time in New York about seven of those ten weeks were spent in the East Village this became kind of our home base while we are staying in the city I had the idea to get a shot like this for a while while I was there but I ended up getting it kind of spontaneously and almost by accident just a few days before I left I was on the subway and past the station that this cube is located at I decided randomly to just get off and try and attempt to get this shot and luckily a couple people came by and decided to spend the cube around while I was there and I'm really glad I did because I think this adds a lot to kind of conveying the message that I'm trying to get across and the voiceover visually and having visuals that tie in to the concept behind the entire video and I believe when I got this shot was actually the last time that I visited that area of the city before I left so I'm really glad that I decided to get this and that I was able to have this shot and have you know a kind of special part of the city be included in the video then we've got a sequence of a few shots here where I wanted it to seem like the subway was taking us around different parts of the city and then finally this hyperlapse of the Flatiron Building which even when I shot this I had the idea of it representing kind of moving from one face to another and seeing something different as you turn that corner then we move into this kind of daytime crunchy textured orange sequence and as you can see with the color grid here I've basically just killed everything except the reds and oranges there's a little bit of blue and kind of D saturated green but it's really supposed to be just predominantly red orange and gray another editing choice I made here that's really not caressed ik of my usual video style at all is that I chose not to diffuse the highlights and that's something I do on almost every shot take the highlights and bored them out but here I chose not to do that just for this one single sequence to kind of show a bit more of that rough sharper texture as opposed to smoothing it out then we have our first transition this time-lapse of the Empire State Building where we can see the storm rolling in and this is completely fake I have to admit you can go back earlier in the video and see the time lapse that I took it from and the clouds don't look anything like this I basically just took it sky replaced it kind of keyframe the colors to change and get darker and then added some fake lightening in to create this transition that then moves into this moody sequence around Chinatown in Koreatown where I've basically done a pretty similar thing with the color grading where I've kind of killed everything except the reds and oranges in the shot except here I've added a bit to it but kind of cooling it off and darkening the footage a lot and while on the sequence before this I decide not to diffuse the highlights to give it that harsher textured look here I absolutely diffuse the hell out of the highlights for the purpose of making it look as if there was water on the lens while I was filming there's also a few additional sky replacements in the sequence for example this shot where the sky was overexposed so I just keyed it out and then tracked in some clouds to give it that moody vibe and make it more obvious that this is taking place during a storm this shot is also a sky replacement which then leads into a couple hyper lapses and we see that color fade and we're now in the historic sequence completely black and white color grade showing some historic spots around the city believe it or not this was without a doubt the trickiest sequence in this entire video to edit because there's a lot more effects in it than you might realize for example this shot I'll put it side to side on the screen right now but this street in this shot of the Flatiron Building in the financial district is not a cobblestone street it's just a regular black pavement street and there's kind of a giant metal grate in the shot which I figured didn't look particularly historic I just kind of preferred that cobblestone look for the financial district so I added that cobblestone street back in I took it from another shot masks the ground out of the original shot and then just tracked it on back there and it turned out pretty well just to use this shot further as an example I also went through with content aware fill and After Effects and did a couple of manual like mask and track clone stamps to cover up some street signs and a car in the background I just thought those made is super obvious that this was not an old historic setting so I just got rid of them to hopefully make it seem a bit more like we're taking the viewer back in time as cheesy as that sounds throughout this sequence I'm also using a lot of old voiceovers behind all of the clips there's one of FDR talking about the Statue of Liberty I downloaded an old newsreel from like 1920 something about the city I took a clip from the Great Gatsby just having fun with the old sampled voiceovers along with the sound design here like the trolley the propeller plane the steamboat to give it that old New York feel and have you hear some things that you wouldn't hear in the city in 2019 but you might have in 1919 so yeah instead of just slapping like a black-and-white filter on this and calling it a day I really wanted to take it a bit further and give it more of an immersive feeling like we're taking the viewer back to that time period then we completely juxtaposed these two sequences and transition from the older historic spots to the very futuristic modern sequence of this video I've used the color fade to transition from black and white to blue but I've also chosen a couple specific shots to use to do that so this first shot of the fearless girl statue across the street from the stock exchange I thought represented kind of moving into the future socially like gender equality on Wall Street something absolutely unheard of in this time period that we're still very much moving towards and not even close to there yet so I thought that absolutely represented kind of New York moving into the future and then the High Line which is an old trolley line that's and kind of refurbished and turned into just cool like walk away it has a lot of like newer very modern apartments by the side of it it's a very futuristic looking part of the city that used to be a trolley line so it really represents taking the old and turning it into something very new and futuristic as you can see the color grade in the sequence is all blue literally what I did to color grade this was I took the footage I turned it black-and-white and then I used an effect called hue colorized it just turned it all one color and turned it this kind of teal ish blue color and then graded it from there and a lot of these shots didn't look particularly natural if they were 100% blue so you can see here on shots like this where we've got the orange restaurant that I've masked out and put back in and also most of the shots that had leaves plants or trees in them I've masked that part of the frame out and then put it back on a separate layer and put it at a 50% opacity to just bring back a bit of that color so it's not completely blue because blue trees just looks a little bit off I found so a lot of these shots are just completely color shifted to be entirely blue and then I've taken those those smaller areas if you look closer and mash them out and put them back in their original color that sequence ends off with this time-lapse shot from the Manhattan Bridge showing the Brooklyn Bridge and the New York skyline including the One World Trade Center and this is pretty much the money shot of the video it's the longest shot by far it's like 20 seconds long I believe and it's easily one of the hardest ones to shoot I was out shooting on the Manhattan Bridge seeing this view of the skyline I saw that the sunset was just absolutely amazing and knew I needed to get a time-lapse of it the only problem I didn't have my intervalometer in my bag so instead of just setting my camera up with the intervalometer and having it take photos at intervals automatically what I had to do was set a timer on my phone and just watch it and every five seconds I would take a photo just press the shutter button every five seconds I stood there for I believe about 45 minutes to shoot this time-lapse I did edit this shot a good bit I reversed it and posed to turn it from a sunset into a sunrise to fit the story and the flow of the video I also shifted the colors to make it a lot more dramatic that it was going from blue from that night look to very orange warm look in the sunrise setting and I also added in the Sun unfortunately yes the Sun is fake I basically just wanted it to match the two shots at the end where you can see the Sun just barely peeking through a couple buildings in the skyline but yeah out of all the shots in this video this is definitely one of the ones if not the one that I'm the most proud of just mostly because of how much went into it and then finally the last sequence of the video is this sunrise sequence that I basically intended to show how people can escape the noise of the city so it's mostly parks there's a bit of Central Park and a bit of Brooklyn Bridge Park in Brooklyn across the river funny story this was actually originally the entire video concept was to make a video showing how people can escape from the noise of the city but I basically decided after a while that I didn't have enough footage that was centered around that in order to make that idea really come to life I would have had to very much script without storyboard it shot list it and really centered the shoot around that and that just wasn't gonna be much fun to do and I wanted to see more of the city than just that one aspect I guess I'm glad in the grand scheme of things that I decided to go for something a bit less focused because I feel like this concept moving around the city and showing a bunch of different aspects just has a lot more depth to it than trying to give it one particular focus all about being said now that we've made it through I want to give you kind of an FAQ about this video and answer a few questions that I saw a lot of comments about when the video went up week ago but I got the most questions about was of course here as usual so to give you those answers I shot this video on OSR and I used a Tokina 1116 a sigma 35 a Tamron 45 and a Tamron 85 which I got at B&H in New York after breaking the 45 there was no drone in here I saw some questions about that and it isn't that true that New York is I believe the second most illegal place to fly a drone in the United States right behind Washington DC so any aerial lookin footage that you see is either from a fly on helicopter ride or a rooftop hyperlapse or just a rooftop shot with a telephoto lens the hyperlapse is I shot all using just handheld photos no gimble's just holding my camera taking a photo focusing on one point and then taking a step and taking another photo I made a video all about it which you can watch by clicking right up here it's a little dated be warned but I think it still gets the concept across and then just smooth those out I either just used warp stabilizer or if that didn't work then I would go into After Effects and manually track one or two points to stabilize them that way for time lapses the process was pretty straightforward I just used an intervalometer and put the camera on aperture priority and then used a plugin and post called flicker free that makes it to where it doesn't flicker which is something you can usually get when you're shooting on aperture priority I got a lot of questions about grading and people assuming that I graded this in DaVinci Resolve that's actually not true I did all of the grading for this video completely inside of Premiere Pro just using a limit recolor and I've got a tutorial on the futuristic blue color grade coming next week so stick around for that but until then I think that's just about everything I wanted to talk about with this video if you haven't seen the original video don't know why you would sit through this but uh yeah go check it out right up here if you have seen it sit thank you I appreciate it I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you enjoyed this video as well and if you did do feel free to share your support but leaving a like on the video sharing it with your friends or even subscribing to my channel I upload your filmmaking tutorials every single week but that's all for now keep creating and see you and [Music]

Channel: Aidin Robbins

Views: 62,613

Keywords: aidin robbins, aiden robbins, aidan robbins, faces of nyc, how i edit a cinematic travel video, cinematic, travel video, cinematic travel video, how i edit, tutorial, breakdown, editing breakdown, editing tutorial, travel video editing, travel video tutorial, travel video tips

Id: GaG9n_acKic

Length: 20min 15sec (1215 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 26 2019