In Camera Transitions: A Masterclass.

[Music] this is the video you've been asking me to make I don't like being told what to do my wife is calling hi what time is 5:25 believe you just got to film me talking to the camera I'm doing right now soon as I finish this love you bye but I don't like being told what to do so I haven't done it but it seems like I probably should do it so now I'm doing it this is the in camera transitions tutorial video by Jessie driftwood circa late 2018 to the computer [Music] okay so before we get started with the how how of these transitions I think it's important that we first discuss well what is a transition but more importantly why are you using them a good video with no transitions is still a good video in a bad video with all the transitions in the world we'll never save it transitions should be treated as another tool in your toolkit to tell stories they are not fundamentally cinematic usually what you want to happen is the camera disappears the Edit disappears and every decision serves to make you fall deeper into this story to make you connect more with the characters and so what can happen with these transitions is they actually make you more aware of the camera however in this world of YouTube and Instagram and tik-tok there's a bit more of a marriage between the creator and the creation and I think you would agree that a lot of me my videos is about me in the camera and how that relates to my life and you and your camera and your life all right I'm losing it here let's backpedal and let's get into what exactly a transition is in the first place so a transition is anything really that takes you from one frame to another frame that helps the story the Edit in particular fluff your editor is gonna typically have these transitions like cross dissolve and star wipes and this other one that I found and in more recent years people have made their own transition packs they make zoom effects and whips and pans and all that sort of thing so people are constantly asking me Jessie which transitions do you use in the simple answer is none of them I make all of my transitions in camera what I mean by this is when I have my camera at the end of a shot I'm gonna whip it in a direction and at the beginning of the next shot I'm gonna whip it in the same direction so that in the Edit there's literally just a hard cut and because there's no decipherable information in that motion blur or you don't see the cut and it seems like some sort of fancy voodoo wizardry has taken place the truth is I just whipped the camera and I cut the shot and I whipped the camera and boom Bob's your uncle Sally is your aunt god rest her soul so for me a transition is anything that obstructs or obscures the frame and sometimes that's vehicles driving by or camera dialling behind objects sometimes that's whips and really anything that makes your frame less understandable the reason why this works is similar to what magicians call sleight of nope misdirection because you may assume that when the camera whips right what you're going to see is well what's to the right of the camera however what you may have taken someone from is indoors to outdoors or what you may have taken someone from is daytime to nighttime it acts as a way to keep your viewer engaged because they're constantly left wondering what's happened what's in the frame and hopefully and not a confusing way and so while this may all seem rather basic there's actually quite a few little techniques that go into this so I wanted to offer you some tips to help rectify some of the more commonly made mistakes so here's that so the first and most important thing you need to know and the biggest mistake I see you have to know what your shot is gonna be so you don't want to just be with your camera just whipping it around throwing it without already first knowing where you want your frame to end so the goal isn't take the camera out whip it and then kind of find something and then whip it away the goal is pretend there's no transition figure out what do you want to see in your frame and then once you have your exact composition you can kind of work backwards so you can say okay this shot needs to whip from the right or this shot needs to be revealed from behind something tip number one know what you're gonna shoot before you whip the camera around tip number two is that your camera motion should to an extent make sense it should be either following action or having a consistent flow within the Edit so if I were to film Christoph Hector stop riding his one wheel and he's riding from right to left I probably don't want to from left to right to follow him again to whip again it's gonna feel jarring and disjointed so what I can do is if I just go to the other side of the street now I'll be whipping from left to right following with him and then whipping again see much much better so the next thing that you're gonna want to pay attention to is the overall color and exposure of what's in the frame when you're whipping because you don't want to whip up to a bright blue sky and then whip out of your underexposed black shirt then nothing is going to get lost in the motion blur because it's going to be a hard cut between bright blue and dark black so if your last shot did happen to whip up to a bright blue sky look around maybe there's a blue garbage can you can come up from or maybe there's a brighter patch of pavement or something like that just avoid drafts Lee different exposures between frames or drafts in different colors [Music] so the next tip is don't always be whipping your camera the same direction all the time get creative with it if you whipped one time well what else could you use to have motion blur and obscure the frame so that last shot the camera itself dollied past a beige wall and then now I've just thrown my beige jacket out of the way so we've gone from a moving shot to a static shot but the transition is still sold because the direction remains the same and that we're overall color and brightness remains the same like all the tips we talked about before [Music] the next tip is actually about focus and exposure you're going to want to lock your focus lock your exposure because as we mentioned you already know your shot so if I'm gonna whip to myself I'm gonna find my shot disable the autofocus and then I'm gonna do the whip because you don't want to have to see this happen in the shot and you don't want to have to wait for the camera to get in focus because when you're using all these transitions what you want is for there to be a nice clean flow through your edit and that flows is gonna get interrupted if you're waiting for the camera to focus or if you're waiting for the exposure to come back down or come back up from whatever you have just whipped from so lock your focus lock your exposure know your shot [Music] the next tip that I had is actually about how fast you're gonna be panning the camera the last thing that you want is to whip so quickly that you can't smoothly okay hang it take yourself good the last thing that you want is to have whipped so quickly that you can't smoothly land on your composition so be methodical about how much you've moved and how much motion blur you're creating but don't just wrap otherwise you're never gonna get your compositions right the other thing is you can always speed up with a bit of speed ramping in post if you haven't moved quite quick enough just speed it up a bit it's gonna work and now that you have all these little tips tips tips just the tip now that you have all these little tips let's break down the edit from the beginning of this video let's see how much you can see of what I've done and now I'm out of a job I guess I don't know back to the computer alright hopefully those tips helped you along the way and as promised let's break down that first edit and I want to see if you can more easily spot what I'm doing while shooting in order to create those edits I'll even put a little box in the corner so you can see what I was doing okay no need to guess [Music] so right here in this first shot it might seem like a simple walk back but I'm also slowly zooming the lens from about 70 millimetres to its widest of 24 millimeters by the end of the shot now I repeated this shot several times over because I was trying to keep that little Cathedral as close to centered as possible so that in post I knew I'd be able to stabilize the shot and fix out any of those jiggles right here at the end just a simple pan right into this gray wall at this point this one shot is all I've planned out and so now I know I need a second shot that is somehow revealed from gray looking around the studio I found this gray pillow which seemed to be a perfect match so I've set the gray pillow up in a way that I can just dolly myself out from behind it revealing a bit more of the location next shot is just a hard cut out which gives more context of what that pillow was it's just kind of mess in this chaotic studio environment so Chris I'll continue that same motion of dulling to the right as I enter frame with my backpack and he whips the camera to the right following that shot I then hold the camera overhead continuing that same whip to the right motion however now we've adjusted from a regular straight on perspective to a flat down overhead perspective and take a few steps and then we were gonna whip the camera following the whip up I have Christoph sitting at the top and just dollying out overhead to reveal an overhead shot which shows me looking up at this machine and grabbing hold of the first shelf we then moved to a POV angle I just stick a GoPro in my mouth and my hands grabbing the Shelf look down towards my feet and then I use that pull and pan up with my neck in order to create the motion blur for our next transition in the next shot I had Kristoff follow that same motion which is he'll ting up but also raising beyond this shelf and then pushing through so that it creates this kind of 3d tunnel effect and finally we just cut to the wide you see everything chaotic studio me making my way to the top and there you have it now watching that sequence back it's pretty clear that 90 plus percent of everything that goes into these transitions that I make is pure camera movement however what happens if it wasn't you that shot the footage or what happens if you forgot to shoot those transitions or what happens if you shot the transitions wrong and you whipped in the wrong direction or you panned the wrong way what do you do and for that answer I have teamed up with the fine folks over at story blocks story blocks who are sponsoring this video are a subscription stock footage website but they're much more than that they also have things like After Effects templates and music and texture backgrounds all sorts of things to help your production along so I've pulled up their website and I'm gonna download a bunch of footage that I didn't take and I'm gonna show you what I would do to this footage to help the Edit flow some of these tips that I actually used in that first sequence so let's dive into the computer and do that together [Music] if you've been following my work for any amount of time you'll know that I like to do a lot of speed ramping and this edit will be no different so I'm going to be speeding up and slowing down here and there particularly on the ends and beginnings of the clips to give the illusion that we're zooming from the first shot which is the outer aerial shot all the way into this marketplace to further enhance this effect I'm actually just also going to keyframe a bit of zoom at the end of this clip and the beginning of the next clip to help make that zoom effect a bit more prominent to tie these two clips together I'm also going to just grade them into a similar sort of neon II vibe which should help sell the idea that we're zooming out from this wider shot into this tighter shot of the same hopefully seen over top of these speed ramps I'm also gonna add just a little bit of motion blur to kind of hide some of the imperfections and hide the actual cut itself at the end of this clip I'm gonna do a similar thing where I'm gonna speed up the end and zoom as well but for this clip I'm also going to adjust the position to give it a slight slide up effect which is going to help send us into this next drone shot here following this final speed ramp session I found this nice shot tilting up to the Milky Way and I'm gonna speed ramp the beginning of this I'm just gonna send us up into the sky and a final speed ramp at the end of that is gonna go to a completely static time-lapse and how we're gonna sell this effect I'm gonna zoom the clip itself into about a hundred and fifty percent or so so that on the first frame of it and a handful of frames in I'm gonna be able to keyframe that position so it gives the illusion of a bit of a tilt up or a bit of a dolly up which along with some speed ramping and along with some motion blur should help sell that effect once more finally something that I don't do a lot of but I do find it a lot of fun and you'll see me doing it here and there and Moe saidit's I'm actually gonna mask this next car time-lapse in by drawing a mask over this car that enters frame and allowing the car to wipe the entire shot into frame so frame by frame I will just adjust these key frames so that in the end you have something that looks like this a little bit of sound design and bada-bing bada-boom you've got yourself a decent little edit [Music] it's not perfect but I did it really quickly and was a bit of finessing I hope these tips should be somewhat helpful for you I think that's it I think we're done if you guys have enjoyed this video if you found some sort of helpful information in it I would really appreciate a thumbs up subscribe bell come do the YouTube things that make youtubers ha or happy that make us make our lives fulfilled if you hated this video let me know why and hopefully I can do better next time because there will be a next time regular updates coming 2019 love you guys [Music]

Channel: JesseDriftwood

Views: 1,489,081

Keywords:

Id: 458I2hkaqjk

Length: 16min 48sec (1008 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 30 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/goldfishpaws]

I watched the first few minutes, it's not bad, but I am not usually a fan of gratuitous transitions. Between scenes they can sometimes be effective to carry a scenic element forward creating a thematic link (person A sets down a beer bottle, person B picks up an oil can to repair the car), or can suggest an action, some time, or otherwise support the story in a fun way. Within a scene, they're toxic.

Every single thing you see in a movie was put there for a reason. Every prop, every line of dialogue, every makeup cue, every reaction, every bit of Foley, every camera angle, every cut. That's why movies can be enjoyable. When transitions are over used, you feel like you're on a generic YouTube travel vlog. Every single thing in a film must contribute to the whole, and not be there for no reason. Use fancy cuts with care, they're a strong flavour.

Who gets this stuff right almost all the time? Edgar Wright is a great example of a director who uses this stuff effectively - the planning is meticulous and they never feel out of place, but he can do this as he gets so much else right. Just throwing effects at mundanity only makes it more mundane!!

[u/stephenkucher]

I saw this tutorial on youtube and thought it was very insightful, this could help people get away from the standard transition packs and start being more creative in the transitions they use.

[u/AshTulett]

I really enjoyed this, thanks for posting!