#TimelineTuesday

When finishing a project, it is always good to take 5 and review what worked, and what didn’t so well. After all, the best way to learn is through making mistakes right?

When we were asked to create a new music video for Johnny Hates Jazz, we knew we had a chance to make something special. Fortunately, we had an amazing team on hand with ideas spilling.

The idea was to use an artistic flare of double exposure, mixed with bright colours. We wanted to shoot everything at the highest resolution possible. We wanted a fast paced cut to match the song. Most of all we wanted both these things in double.

Now that’s where things get tricky. Not only is it a strain on hardware, but it quickly becomes difficult to fathom.

That is unless you maintain a bit of house keeping on your projects… here’s a few tips:

• Use colour labels where you can to make identifying clips quick and easy
• Try your best to keep certain elements to certain tracks. For example, we used a lot of matte’s for the double exposure. Keep the matte’s on one layer, keep the footage on another.
• The same applies for audio, keep individuals, individual.
• Keep your project bins labelled and organised. When we had people asking for extra footage of Clarke, we needed to find it asap. Keeping bins organised meant this was a breeze.
• If you’re using multicams, label them too… just label everything, make searching easy.
• When making multiple edits, have a naming function ready. When asked for the fourth version, a filename with “JHJ_1A2B” suddenly doesn’t mean so much..

There’s plenty more tips you will pick up along the way, but as always it’s best to keep everything organised. This makes editing far easier on you and the client.