Blog: Kno the Signs Music Video - BTS & Process

Hello again, it has honestly felt like an eternity since I wrote anything on my blog here. It almost feels like it has been a year since my last post…Sorry, I just had to make at least one joke. Anyways, I hope everyone is having a good start to their year. Whether that be finally getting to your New Years resolutions, or finally picking up that book that you’ve been wanting to read for years, I just hope everything is going better for you this year compared to last year. Hopefully things this year a bit less stressful and scary, at least that’s what I hope. 

Anyways, to the topic at hand, I recently accomplished one of my things on my bucket list this year which was to create a music video of some sort for a musician. Of course this has been something on my bucket list for a while now, but this year I really wanted to make it happen. Luckily for me, an artist named Gertzy reached out to me to shoot a video for his now released song “Kno the Signs” and I happily agreed. However, after I agreed, I then realized that I had never really “done” a music video before and was pretty lost on how to even start creating one. 

That’s where my deep dive into YouTube and SkillShare began. With my search history being a list from “how to shoot music video’s,” to “Tutorial on music videos.” To be honest this past month or so has been the most time I’ve spent trying to research something, probably more time any research I’ve done in college. Sorry Professor G. But yeah, I really spent a lot of time just trying to figure out how to shoot the video, where to shoot the video, how to edit it, what to use to edit, all that sort of stuff. Luckily, Gertzy had a couple of ideas that helped me through the process, giving me key things he wanted in the video and where he wanted to shoot. Honestly the importance of collaboration and communication in this project was something that I never really thought of before hand but it really made a difference in a good way. 

Now, for those of you who don’t really care too much about how I made the video and what I ended up doing and creating for Gertzy, you can just finish reading this paragraph and skip to the end where the final products will be added. For those of you who want to stick around and see my process throughout the whole thing in the long winded way I usually do things, please continue to read onward, and know that I love you just a tab bit more than those who skipped to the end. Like you’re my favorite child but we can’t say that around them. 

Day 1 January 22nd

So day one, the day that started it all of course. Previous to this day, Gertzy and I had talks on where to shoot and what time to shoot. The plan was to shoot between 12pm and 4pm a time that I thought would produce the most interesting light here in good old Virginia, starting at a parking garage located in downtown Fredericksburg. Being somewhere familiar to me, it made it a lot easier to figure out how to shoot and what places seemed interesting to shoot at. We met up at the parking lot with him and a couple of his friends, making sure not to exceed the number of people allowed to be in a group at a time. You know, gotta be socially responsible these days. But yeah, from there we took a couple of shots on the top of the parking garage, which were probably my favorite shots throughout the day. I found that watching a lot of videos on “how to shoot a music video” didn’t really help, it was one of those things that you kinda had to do to get good at which I found out pretty soon. But I think I shot most of the shots pretty well. I think my composition could have been a bit better but that’s just gonna  have to be a lesson for the next time. 

But yeah, after the parking garage, we spent some time walking the streets to get a couple shots of the squad long boarding.  Only a couple of the shots that I took ended up okay, mostly due to me not know how to shoot people on longboards but we made a couple of those shots work. We even ended up shooting in this little back alley next to the parking garage which was pretty interesting. I had some nice soft lighting and shade and had this nice brisk breeze coming through to add more dynamic to the shot. We had also shot some stuff near the water on this side walk, but I didn’t stabilize the shoot too well so those shots didn’t come out too good. Luckily for me we shot a lot of performance shots around the area so with a couple shots not working out too well, I still had a couple of shots to work with in post. We also took photos in those various locations to get some photos for the cover art and stuff like that.  

Overall the shoot went pretty smoothly on the day, It was chill and laid back and when I got home I got straight to creating some backups of everything because it would have been a complete disaster if I ended up losing all of the work that we had done. I also started messing around with putting the clips together and syncing them to the song. I used Adobe Premiere Pro to do most of the editing throughout this day just to put everything together and organize everything. I ended up creating a couple cuts and made a color grade by 12am to send off to Gertzy to get his input. They were pretty rough but I will add the examples of those cuts below if you want to watch them and see the COMPLETE process. But after that I hit the bed, thinking about what else I could do with the video. Im pretty sure I had a dream about editing, how quaint. 

Day 2 January 23rd

Well after that most eventful day, now came the day where the real work began. I spent a good 7 or 8 hours at work this day, making coffee for the world. However a good 5 hours before work I began knocking out a good portion of the video. I’d say this day I spent a good 4 hours on the video trying to figure out all the different things that we wanted to add to it and how I could possibly add them. First I began fixing and adding some stuff that Gertzy had wanted in the video. He really wanted to add some animations to the video, which was also something that I had never done before. I might as well say now, this whole experience is something I’ve never done. But you know, I did it anyways and put my mind to learning a bunch of different things in a small amount of time. That is pretty much what I did for the day. I opened up Adobe After effects and learned how to do these hand drawn animations that seemed pretty alright. I spent a large amount of the night drawing and all that. Also, shout out to all the animators and professional drawers that put in work because if I had to count, I probably made over 300 frames of drawings and maybe like over 1000 brush strokes inside of Adobe After After Effects with a MOUSE PAD. I mean it was fun and all and I learned a lot but it was ACTUAL PAIN. Anyways, after having played around with a couple things in After Effects, I finished up another cut and sent that off to my man Gertzy for feedback. 

Day 3 January 24th

This day was a little less eventful. Not gonna lie, at this point I was pretty burnt out but I was still banging out all of the learning and creating that I had to do to get this video done in a decent amount of time. Though I was stressed, it was nice to be working on something in between my job, it gave me some sort of purpose that I have been looking for. Just playing Xbox and sleeping after work has gotten pretty boring. Anyways, during this day I spent even more time adding more animations to the video and really trying to get to a more finalized point. I think I worked on the video from like 7pm to 12am because I ended up taking a dope nap when I got home from work at 4pm that day. That nap was absolutely needed though, because just staring at a screen and animating was really getting to me and I definitely needed a break. But some decent progress was made on this day, with more animation coming out and changing up some things on the edit. Slowly, the video started coming together! Once 12am hit, I sent out another cut for some feedback. To be honest this has been the most communication that I have had with a client before and it was great. Getting feedback every time I sent out something really helped me come up with better ways to do things and make something that he really wanted in the end. 

Day 4 January 25th

Day 4 was one of the last days that I actually worked on the video. I really was trying to finalize the video by this day or at least get it as close to finished as possible on this day because I had planned on working on all of the photos and cover art on the day after this one. So once I got home from work, I stuck my nose to my computer and animated and editing till 12am. Spending time doing animations frame by frame and fixing up the titles that I added. I also finalized some of the edits within the video and made sure that this was one of the last cuts that I ended up doing. I didn’t want to spend too much time on the video in the following day because I wanted to focus on creating the cover art that Gertzy wanted, which you will see, caused me a couple troubles. However, at around 12:17am I sent out another cut with some finalized details and animations and went to sleep whilst watching different photoshop videos on photographic compositions and how to create in photoshop. Im pretty sure I dreamed about grass that day or a field or something, I don’t know, It was definitely about something weird tho. 

Day 5 January 26th 

The last and final day of working on this project has now come. Well I mean I guess you can count this whole blog thing as part of the project but lets just completely ignore that part for now. This day was a day full of editing photos and creating cover. Obviously, being someone who mainly focuses on photography and photo editing, this was something that was more familiar to me. Something that I knew how to do. However, I haven’t really made too many photo composites in my time as a photographer. I’ve made a collage and another composite both that took me a while to do, but I had only a day to do this one. Also he wanted some stuff that I haven’t done before. Obviously I said yes anyways and took the challenge of creating the cover art. It was actually pretty fun, but your boy was struggling. The album is called “NEW LEAF” and we wanted to do something that had his silhouette cut out in grass and surrounded by leaves. To be honest, I had a couple of ideas on how to do this, but I was still pretty lost. I spent a lot of time continuing to watch YouTube videos which led me to just doing it in a trial and error way, just putting something together until it look pretty decent. Finally my thoughts were getting onto the screen with finally figuring out how to create a silhouette and then creating a mask out of that silhouette. Then having that look as if its a cut out inside of a grass clearing was pretty hard to figure out but we did that. I found that the line’s of the mask were pretty hard so I played around with creating a feather around the masks to make sure they weren’t as hard. But after that I just added a nice top view of trees to sell the whole clearing thing I was going for. Overall I was pretty happy with that but there is still something about that clearing that doesn’t look right, but overall still pretty solid. 

As for the photos, I didn’t do too many special things. I spent time color grading them in a similar way to the video to have some sort of consistency between them which I think I did pretty well. I was mostly focused on getting the cover art done and did well so the photos were kinda on the back burner for me but they still ended up coming out well. The last thing I did that day was finalize the last parts of the music video adding a fade in and out and finishing the credits for myself. I also finalized some animations and made sure to send that over to Gertzy at the end of the night so he could start uploading stuff to YouTube to get ready for his drop on the following day. I also made a quick thumbnail for the video on YouTube which also turned out pretty cool too 

Overall the whole experience was great and Gertzy is a pretty dope dude and his music is great too. Being the first client to actually collaborate with me and help with with creative direction throughout the entire process was amazing. I made a lot of stuff and learned a lot of stuff too, and this has been the biggest and longest project I have worked since my last short film. I think that after this I’m going to learn a lot more of stuff inside of Adobe After Effects and start another project of my own or maybe even continue ones that I have put off for months. Anyways it was awesome and those five days were some of the best and most productive days that I have had in a while. 

Well if you have made it this far or skipped around and made it to this part, I want to thank you for being here and reading my stuff. I really appreciate it and I put in a lot of work to make this as well as the content for Gertzy. So it would mean a lot to me if you leave a comment on what you think and if you like the stuff you read or saw. Also be sure to check out my guy Gertzy. I’ll make sure to leave a link to the final video and his music so you can check it out because it is pretty dope and I know I got it on my playlist. So yeah thanks again for being here, and I’ll hopefully get back to doing this blog thing more frequently. Anyways, PEACE LOVE AND POSITIVITY, Love you all <3