Special Effects

 

To edit my music video i used Windows Movie Maker, as it was the only system that my netbook laptop was able to run and i didn't have any other computer i could use. So my selection of special effects were quite narrow, however i did feel it was important to use some, to try and vary the look of the shots as much as possible. I was originally going to use this grainy old film effect on the entirirty of the bands performance but during editing i realised taht it was a waste to plut this effect on every band shot as the definitionw as so high it would be a waste to taint it. However i did keep the effects on some shots like this one of Oli facing forward from the stage, one because it hid the fact that there were no audience for the performance as well as combining with the lighting of the shot really well to leave an incredibly aesthetically pleasing look.

I also used transition effects, rather than opting for the super cheesy swirls or diamond transitions or even a star wars wipe out, the only transition effects i saw as suitable were the fading out and in from black or white, both adding more fluidity, and adding to the charactisation of the two main characters, adding a black vs white motif makes these opposites more clear.

 

My final use of effects was to shoot alot of the close ups on Tim at 1.5 times the speed and then later slow them down in editing so as to create a slow motion effect. This is an effect that is used in the majority of HIM's videos and as has been previously stated the effect does very much fit the lyrics and the vocals to their songs perfectly, so from the very beginning i was dead set on using this effect. though it proved more difficult than i expected as the only option in Windows Movie Maker was to slow down the footage to half the speed rather than -1.5 so i went online and found on a discussion board that it was infact possible to change the exact speed of the video playback by using this xml

TransitionsAndEffects Version="1.0">
<Effects>
<EffectDLL guid="{00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}">
<Effect name="Speed up modified" iconid="32" speed="2.0" comment="Speed up"></Effect>
<Effect name="Slow down modified" iconid="31" speed="0.5" comment="Slow down"></Effect>
</EffectDLL>
</Effects>
</TransitionsAndEffects>

Thank god for computer experts and google is all i can say.