JPF Home Page Forums Lyric and MP3 Feedback Music Video Feedback Forum The Making of 'John Lawrence Schick's Video'

Hi folks. I made a small 1 minute video for 'John Lawrence Schick' for his brother, and did this sort of explanation of how the video was built up, just in case others want to have a go themselves. I hope that its useful. Just a few pointers...

I used two programs. Photoshop 7 (yes I am still using an older version) and Sony Vegas for the video editing.



For those who are thinking of following my path, here is a short lowdown of the processes that I used.

It all started with a picture of the house that I found under a creative commons attribute.



Using photoshop, I straightened the image saved it onto a new layer (so that it was floating).
I then cut away the upper background, where the sky is and carefully cut around all of the cables and telegraph pole.
I also cropped the image to lose the right hand section as it was superfluous and cutting around bushes is never easy..lol



Then I found a 'full moon' image again creative commons and searched on youtube for 'moving clouds greenscreen creative commons' and found a 10 sec clip of exactly that. Free to use.

I created two layers under the house layer, and added the stationary moon onto one with the moving clouds between the moon and house layer.
After altering the speed and opacity of the clouds, I had the house with a full moon and the clouds moving in the background.



I then added 3 layers above the house layer for the attic lights on, the curtains on the attic windows and the ghost woman who appears at the window.

I made the curtain layer almost transparent, so that the lights layer would shine through them, and also allow the woman to appear behind the curtains.

In the image I have put a blue background to show the content of each layer.

By doing it on layers, it allowed me to switch layers off and on as the video ran. So lights on and off, and woman appearing and vanishing at will.



Because the original house image had the downstairs lights on, to achieve the same effects as I did with the attic windows, I made another 3 layers above the others.

But instead of having a layer to add light, I did 1 layer to cover the lights and two other layers for the downstairs ghosts who appear at different times.

No need for curtains as the original house image already had curtains, however to make the ghosts appear behind the glass and curtains I made a layer of the lights on to go in front of the ghosts, and by making that layer almost transparent, the ghosts seem to be behind the glass.



I then did the picket fence on another layer, the fence I created in Photoshop, using bits of old fences from creative commons images.

I also made the two signs in the same way by combining bits of old wood.

And so the final was finished and I then added the text that 'John' had sent to me.

I tried many types of text before settling on plain text so as not to distract from the background scene.

For the text on the two signs I found a great online site that lets you create the fancy text and make the background transparent. again FREE.

http://eu4.flamingtext.co.uk/

If the background of the text is made transparent, and saved as a png file, it really is useful. There is a limit on length, but it easy to join text images together in Photoshop.

I used it to make the text on the two signs and also the text on the youtube thumbnail image.



Finally I felt that the video needed a intro effect and end effect to liven it up a bit and add a bit of magic.

I searched on youtube for "video intro green-screen Sony Vegas creative commons" and came across a great guy who creates intros for Vegas and lets you download the files to adapt them in your own Vegas to suit your needs... free to use as well.

I removed some elements of it and thats what you see in the first few seconds of the video and near the end of the video.

Anyway this is a compressed version of the making of the video, whereas in reality, it was a lot more work to arrive there. At one stage I had 35 layers open, and ended up with 301 files. just under 4 GB of data.



I hope this explanation helps others wanting to do a bit of video work.

God Bless Roy and Helen