Cathedral of Moths - Experimental Video

Some time after first experimenting with After Effects, I delved rather into Premiere Pro, which is more accessible in terms of hardware and rendering for my laptop. I had the idea again of taking a song and trying to sync up footage, creating a short, experimental, piece of work to practice first of all filming, then editing and cutting and combining shots.

The video below is the result I achieved, only 11 seconds of footage - but quite a long process; I think I worked on this for around 6 hours in a single day, then continued editing the next day. I was very passionate about this project, I had not even intended to create this type of thing initially - what I first did was take a bunch of experimental, one second clips of one of my house plants, framing the leaves and placing a sheet of paper behind them for an optimal colour balance, taking away any background distractions.

//viewer discretion for loud music + quick paced, flashing images//

After taking this footage, putting it into Premiere and slowly timing up the cuts with the music chosen (Cathedral of Moths - Dreamcrusher), I then was inspired to continue the video, and thought what elements I could use to further this video. I wanted a contrast between the natural, green plant - something industrial perhaps. I have this old clock I took apart and filmed the process of - also mimicked the way in which the camera quickly cuts closer to the object, directly comparing the previous shots with the yellow leaf.

Here I then had the idea of continuing this natural/industrial comparison, thinking of returning to a natural setting, but perhaps in a state of more urgency, as the music paced up and I wanted to visually transcribe this as well. I didn't have a tripod, but set up my camera against some books and a box leaning against the window, and took a timelapse of the sun setting.

In editing, as the footage became more sporadic, I did the same as I did in the After Effects video - posterizing and editing the hue and saturation of the footage. I didn't get around to many effects besides this, if I were to continue this work though, and if I had a better graphics driver, I'd definitely delve more into the editing besides just cutting and experimenting with colour.

Overall, this was an excellent experience and practice, I hope to incorporate things I've learned here into further work.