Night Falls - Detailed Behind the Scenes

YouTube Link

Vimeo Link 

Details

Time Spent Filming: 50-60hrs

Time Spent Editing: 200-240 hrs

Programs Used

- Adobe Premiere [Video Editing, Colour Grading, Final Render, Subtitles]

- Handbrake [Converting video clips for use within Adobe Premiere]

- Clibgrab [Downloading videos from YouTube]

- Subtitle Edit [Subtitle Formatting]

Services Used

- Motion Array [LUTs]

- Envato Elements [Additional Assets]

Video Details

- 4K

- 23.98 fps

- 381 kbps

- Rec .709 Colour Space

Planning and Goals

I had several goals in mind when making Night Falls. For one - I just wanted to make a video. Any video since it had been so long since my last upload. Secondly, I wanted to get a feel for how to integrate live action and anime. Despite having an animation focused YouTube channel I’ve always been more into live action. It would also be a good test run for the documentary I’m making (read the May Update article for more details on that). I wanted to learn new things like how to process and edit live action footage, colour grade, do effects. I wanted to experiment and expand what I could do. At the end of February, I went through my sakuga collection, came up with some ideas and started work on 3 videos. Night Falls was the one I focused on and finished first.

I got the idea to use OH NO, OH YES! after going through my Soundcloud likes. I liked the song 日本のタイトルWhatever  (Translation: “Japanese Title Whatever”) by Android52 a few years ago but I’d never heard the song they used as the sample before this year. After hearing it for the first time I knew I wanted to edit to it. I loved making the final section of the Hair & Fabric MAD which has a comparable city pop vibe to OH NO, OH YES!. So I decided to make a slower paced city pop music video with footage I shot myself.

NOTE: It’s worth mentioning that I do copyright checks before I edit to a song. This song wasn’t tagged for copyright by YouTube, and it’s has been uploaded to YouTube several times by other channels. But I’ve found at least 2 uploads of this song that were taken down by the copyright holder. So not every upload that features that song has been taken down, but it’s still possible that this video will be removed. If that happens you should still be able to watch it on Vimeo. I recommend watching it on Vimeo anyway to see the 4K footage I shot in higher quality.

The lyrics of the song are about a woman feeling conflicted about an affair she’s having. But on a broader level they’re about yearning for happiness in a lonely city. I thought this would be a good theme to focus on in my editing.

Overall, I’m really happy with how this turned out. I’m still a beginner at many of the things I tried. But I’m happy for the experience and knowledge I gained.

Filming

Equipment

Camera: Nikon Z9

Lenses

- Sirui 50mm T2.9 1.6x Anamorphic lens for Nikon Z Mount [Main lens, used for most shots]

- Nikon Z 24-70mm F2.8 S [TV & projector shots]

- Nikkor Z MC 105mm f/2.8 VR S lens [Extreme close ups & bokkeh]

- Nikon Z 70-200mm f/2.8 VR S [Establishing shot of city in intro]

Sirui W-2204 Tripod

iFootage Cobra 2 C180-II Monopod

Prism Lens FX Kaleidoscope FX Filter

Qumi Q6 800 Lumens LED Projector

Zoom H5 Recorder

Props

Teac CRT TV

Sakuga Kanji Crystal Ball

Footage Details

Format: .MOV HEVC 10 Bit

N-Log

60-120fps

4K

Stills from shots that didn't make it into the video

This technically isn’t the first video I’ve filmed footage for. I shot that footage of the sun reflecting off a lake’s surface that you see at the beginning of Sakuga Ambient Action on my phone. But this is by far my most ambitious use of footage that I’ve filmed and the first time I’ve used a professional camera for my YouTube work.

A quick rundown of the lenses I used:

- Sirui 50mm T2.9 1.6x Anamorphic lens - I shot almost all the outdoor footage with this. An anamorphic lens, meaning the image you get out of it is vertically stretched. You squeeze the footage down in post to make everything the correct proportion which leaves the image with black bars at the top and bottom. Anamorphic lenses give a "filmic" look and pointing the lens at strong light sources creates blue lens flares.

- Nikon Z 24-70mm F2.8 S - A general purpose lens that can do wide shots or close ups. Used to film the TV and projector shots because the ability to zoom in and out gave me more flexibility with how I could frame shots.

- Nikkor Z MC 105mm f/2.8 VR S lens - A macro lens, meaning it's designed for close-up photography. Used to film extreme close ups of leaves and the TV. I also used it to shoot the bokkeh (the large out of focus lights).

- Nikon Z 70-200mm f/2.8 VR S - A zoom lens, able to zoom in much farther than any of the lenses mentioned before. I only used it for one shot, the shot of the city skyline at sunset that you see at the beginning and in the thumbnail of the video.

I wanted to use as much of my own footage as possible. I took over 1000 shots across 15 days of filming. I took the camera equipment I got access to in January then just went out into Sydney CBD to see what I could make.

Wynyard Station

Most shots were filmed at Wynyard Station and Barangaroo – a relatively new location with great views of the sunset. The 2nd shot of the video, the city skyline at sunset, was taken from Bradley’s Head. I’d taken some videos of the skyline from the other side, at Barangaroo. But the sun wasn’t hitting the buildings in the way I wanted. I used a shot of the city at night taken from Barangaroo reserve as the 2nd last shot of the video though. The shots used during the 2nd chorus (rain hitting stone sculptures, shots of LED screens) were filmed at Haymarket near Chinatown.

Barangaroo & Haymarket

I wanted the shots I took to be as unidentifiable as possible. I didn’t want to show landmarks like the Opera House or the Harbour Bridge. I wanted the city to feel non-specific, like it could be anywhere. Although obviously, if you’ve been to Sydney you’d be able to tell. The blue patterned train seats and the Telstra phone booth give it away.

Flickering was a constant issue when filming. I hadn’t done much night videography before shooting for this video. I was shocked to see that when I looked at my footage after I got home from the first day of filming that every light in my shots was strobing like crazy. This happened because nearly all the shots in the video were filmed for slow motion, meaning I shot them at either 60 or 120 frames per second so I could slow them down in post. I liked the peaceful atmosphere slow motion added to the video. But you have to increase your shutter speed when you shoot at higher frame rates . I won’t explain shutter speed in detail, you can learn about it here if you’re interested. But the long and short of it is that cameras can capture footage faster than some light sources generate light and this is tied to shutter speed.

I zoomed in on this shot of the leaves in my edit to make the flickering lights on the boardwalk less distracting.

When shooting at 120 frames per second I can’t set my shutter speed to below 1/125. But to stop flickering I have to set it to 1/100 at most, even lower for some light sources. So some shots had to be filmed in 60fps. Something that made this harder was that there could be many kinds of lights in any one shot. Office lights, led lights, traffic lights and everything in between could have a different refresh rate to the light next to it. If I set the shutter speed to 1/100 some lights would stop flickering while others would start.

A shot with even more obvious flickering

Even worse, most times I couldn’t even see the flicker until after I got home and slowed the footage down. This led to me doing a lot of reshoots. In the end some shots you see in the video still have flickering. But I don’t mind it in some cases. I think the shimmering can look nice. But it was a major hassle. I had to memorise what frame rate and shutter speed to use at different places in the city.

The animators replicated the shutter speed flicker issue in this shot from Turning Red. The fluorescent lights above the character begin to strobe when the scene becomes slow motion.

I bought a CRT TV from a tech recycler in February for the documentary I’m making and thought I’d use it in this video as well. Just like when I was filming in the city, I had to be mindful of the shutter speed while filming so the camera didn’t refresh faster than the TV created the image. I filmed most shots of the TV with a regular 24-70 mm lens and some close ups (for example, the shots of the TV playing On the Beach at Night Alone) using a macro lens to focus in close on the phosphors (the small dots that make up the display).

I ordered a crystal ball with the kanji for sakuga inside of it a few months back for use in some photos I wanted to take. The kanji was written by a calligrapher I commissioned, a separate company I found online produced the crystal ball. The initial plan was that I’d use it for a new profile picture. I’d pinch it between my fingers and hold it in front of a blue sky. I tried this but the effect didn’t really work. For one I kept burning myself, forgetting that the ball is basically a magnifying glass, and couldn’t pose with it for long. Secondly the ball reflected everything around it, meaning the surrounding scenery of the park I was shooting in was more prominent than the sky in the ball.

But I have other uses for it. To get the effect seen during the first chorus I put the sakuga ball on a white desk in a dark room and pointed a projector at it. The projector was playing a loop of a section from the opening of Tekken Tag Tournament - the shots where Kazyua becomes Devil and shoots energy into the sky. The colours, particles and flashes in these shots looked great cascading across the glass.

This was the first projector section I filmed and I made some mistakes. I shot some of the footage at an incorrect shutter speed. You can tell because there are green bands along the desk during the closing shots of the chorus. The camera’s shutter speed was out of sync with the projector’s refresh rate and so the video displayed incorrectly. I tried reshooting these. But I really liked the camera movements, timing and focus pulls in these shots. Aside from the refresh rate issue I think they came out perfect. I couldn’t replicate the timing and motion again of these shots closely enough, so I decided to bite the bullet and use these shots despite the issue.

The kaleidoscope effect around the footage during the 3rd chorus was done practically. I bought a projector and a kaleidoscope lens filter from Prism Lens FX. I edited the section in Premiere and exported it out, hooked up my laptop to the projector and played the video on a loop. I then set up my camera with the kaleidoscope filter and filmed the wall I was projecting onto. I filmed the video from several different angles. I tried filming it handheld, focusing on different parts of the frame depending on where I wanted to pull the audience’s focus. But I ultimately decided to use footage I shot when my camera was on a tripod. The handheld shots didn’t look as good as I’d hoped.

The idea behind this section was to visually reference the reflections you see in the windows of the city buildings in the live action shots. The multiplying reflections of the character's faces mirroring the reflections in the glass.

I took a Zoom H5 audio recorder out on one of my filming trips to record some ambient sounds for the ending. The sounds of the traffic in the city and the water sloshing around were recordings I took at Barangaroo. The traffic recording was taken at the exact same location as the shots that play on top of it. I took the water recording by dangling the recorder off the pier and pointing it at the water.

Anime

I wanted to use as much of my own footage as possible. But I still wanted to include anime to keep a connection with my earlier MADs. The very early edits I made used a lot more anime than what’s in the final cut. I slowly replaced ideas I had for using anime clips with footage I shot over time.

Like I mentioned earlier, I went through folders I made last year to get clips to use in this AMV. I wanted anime clips with a lot of style and ennui. Clips that had that city pop feel and expressed a sense of yearning. Like always I tried to use a mix of well known and lesser known cuts. Famous anime like Ghost in the Shell and Perfect Blue are put alongside a commercial for Kenwood headphones and obscure 90s OVAs like Twilight of the Dark Master.

Twilight of the Dark Master / Key Animation: Takaaki Yamashita (?)

I ended up using several clips of animation by Mai Yoneyama – an animator who’s worked at Gainax and Trigger. Her style reminds me of Megumi Kouno’s. It feels modern, stylish and decadent. Because a lot of clips are from anime made in the 80s and 90s all the familiar animators show up. It would be difficult to make a video about famous anime in the late 20th century and not include shots animated by the likes of Yoshinori Kanada, Takeshi Honda, Hiroyuki Okirua and Yasushi Muraki.

I think scenes that look like they’re set at the magic hour are overdone in anime. But there’s something I really like about the 2nd Jujutsu Kaisen opening. It reminds me of my childhood for some reason. Could be all the wandering around city environments and how “young adult” it all feels. I feel like I’ve used clips from this and the first opening a lot in recent videos.

Kate X Evagelion Commercial / Key Animation: Mai Yoneyama

I was also finally able to use anime clips that I’ve been wanting to use for years. I love the Twilight of the Dark Master cut shown above. Not a whole lot to say about it. Just a big fan the style, colours and the feel. Very controlled and economical timing with that very rich level of detail in the drawing that you see from in cel animated cuts from the 90s.

I also love this cut from Kaze no Matasaburo. Very clean, and I love how the shards of light break off from the glass to sell the impact.

Kaze no Matasaburo

I like every clip I used. But some other favorites of mine are the Glay – Survival 2.7D music video by Koji Morimoto, the shots from the Sorcerer Hunters OP, every clip I used from Hathaway’s Flash and the animation from the X Series of movies. All of them ooze a very overt style that would feel campy if you shot the same of thing in live action (which would be good in and of itself), but in animation it feels more serious.

Editing

Click here to see a comparison of the final edit with a very early one. This early edit took less than a week to make and is unfinished. You can see the development of my ideas through the comparison. I used this stream of consciousness edit to get ideas down and to experiment with the timing of cuts. Also note how many of the shots in the early edit hadn’t yet been colour graded.

Videos of this length usually takes a few days to a week to edit, but Night Falls took over a month. For comparison Ambient Action took 60 hours to make.

Like always I started my edit by going through my collection, getting an idea of what I had then placing clips on the timeline in a stream of consciousness style. I did one day of shooting around Barangaroo before I started, so had both live action and a lot of anime to draw from. I did a fairly comprehensive edit in a day or two. I filled in as much of the timeline as I could then used markers to write down ideas I had for sections I hadn’t finished yet.

Examples of markers I wrote early on

I went through a lot of ideas and changed things around many times over during the roughly month long edit. At one stage I wanted to integrate more video game FMVs. I put FMVs from Final Fantasy X in the first chorus in an early edit. It was in line with the idea that the video was appreciating more than just 2D animation. But it didn’t fit with the vibe of the song. It felt out of place, so the video game footage is limited to the Persona 3 Portable and the Tekken Tag Tournament Openings.

The two shots I was thinking of using

The live action made for a different editing experience than usual. If I didn’t have a shot I wanted in the past I had to make do with what I had or scour the internet for hours. But now I had the power to get just about any shot I wanted, leading to several nights of me running out in the middle of editing to try and catch the sunset or a rainstorm in the city. It gave me a lot more freedom. But also lead to frustration and perfectionism, often reshooting the same shot many times over to get the desired effect. I took about 2TB of live action footage for this video.

I really wanted to use parts from films I like as vocal samples. I liked how this effect worked in the Richard Williams documentary I made. I saw Hong Sang Soo’s On the Beach at Night Alone while I was making the video and thought the line I ended up using in the interlude was perfect.

The hardest thing when editing is achieving the feel you want. It’s hard to put into words. But even one misplaced shot or one cut that’s off by a few frames can make a video feel off. Some shots feel more appropriate to follow others than others. Something about the motion, the camera angle, the colours, certain aspects of a clip make it bleed into other cuts better than some. Figuring out what shots complement others, how to theme sections, how to decide and control the pacing, and how to time the cuts, how to control the feel and message of a section. The creative side of the edit is the most involved process, more than any technical aspect like how to choose the best render settings. The difficulty is in making it feel flawless.

I’m very happy with the editing I did in the 3rd chorus for example, even before any of the effects were applied. In the climax of the song you see well known, retro cuts of animation. There’s a progression of emotion. Beginning with danger and action, running, feeling lost and overwhelmed. Then the need for comfort with the arms around the shoulders, watching the action from afar. Seeing beauty and destruction crescendoing side by side until both of them lose all meaning and become flashing lights. There’s something about this shot progression I enjoy, even without the effects. It took 2 nights to put together and involved me going through my collection several times. The difficulty and creative work came from what to use, where and why. How to reflect what was happening in the music with visuals in a granular way. Making cars speed down the road in time with the song's flow, how to match the momentum in the song with the characters' movements. A character running off screen in time with the vocals, or turning their head with the instruments in a way that enhances the effect of both. Reflecting what’s happening in the song in a granular way while still keeping the broader pacing and intention in mind. Not releasing the tension fully until the very end. That's what was hardest to do here.

Effects

Additional Assets from:

- Envato Elements

- Sonduck films

- Blinddusk

I ended up doing a lot more effects than I planned to, way more than I’ve done in any other MAD. The initial plan was to use programs like Trapcode and After Effects. Maybe even Cinema 4D. But in the end I managed to get all the effects I wanted done in Premiere.

Most of the effects were done through compositing, overlaying film leaders, scratch marks and such with different blend modes then applying blurs and filters to the footage underneath. I did a lot of playing around with the timing of the cuts and the effects themselves until got something I was happy with.

I was influenced by music videos I saw growing up in the late 90s/2000s. I had the Tekken Tag Tournament opening in mind specifically. It’s probably been a bigger influence on my editing style than anything else. I went through the Tekken Tag Tournament opening frame by frame to see how they did various editing effects and replicated some of them broadly in the video. 

The effect where you see a fast post processed close up of Miles right before a wider shot of him was a reference to a similar effect with Jin in the Tekken Tag Tournament Opening

Assets like the film burn and lens flare overlays were taken from various asset libraries. I wasn’t happy with most of the assets I was found on Envato Elements – the library I’ve used for my videos in the past. So I looked bought some asset packs from more music video focused asset creators like Sonduck films and Blinddusk. The finished edit uses assets from all 3 of these libraries.

2 different effects were also overlaid in some sections to give a certain feel. I used a 30mm film filter over some sections to add some grain and texture – make it look crunchier. And used an effect plugin I bought called the dream haze filter. The dream haze filter applies a channel blur and a gaussian blur to footage to give it a hazy look that looks similar to the bloom effect you’d see in a PS3 games and a lot of anime in the early 2000s. I found that the dream haze effect was especially good to use on non-HD footage, or footage with a lot of artifacts. I used the dream gaze filter on the Person 3 Portable opening for example to smooth out the pixels and distract from the low resolution.

The Persona 3 Portable shot before and after applying colour grading and the dream haze filter

As I mentioned earlier in the filming section, the crystal ball and kaleidoscope sections were done practically. But I overlaid some of the aforementioned effects during some cuts for various reasons. I ended up applying a soft version of the dream haze filter to the kaleidoscope vision to smooth out some of the harsh lines and add a dream like quality.

Before and after applying the dream haze filter

Colour Grading

Rec .709 Colour Space

Shot in H.265, N-Log. 10-Bit

This video was my first time colour grading. I don’t have a lot to say about this because I’m an absolute beginner. A colourist would likely point out a million issues with the grading. I’m also red-green colour blind which really doesn’t help.

I felt my way around. I watched colour grading tutorials on YouTube and signed up for some online courses. I learned some basics like how to read scopes (something I had to learn for using the camera anyway) and how to correct colour. But I ended up going with my gut. Adjusting values in the Lumetri colour panel according to my taste until I was happy with the result.

Before and after colour grading

I shot all my footage in Nikon’s N-Log format. Meaning the video I took looked washed out and dull initially. But this washed-out footage contained a lot of dynamic range that allowed me to adjust the colour profile of footage significantly in post. It gave me a lot more freedom when choosing how I wanted things to look when editing. I decided early on that shooting in RAW wasn’t worth it for me given the fact that this video is produced for YouTube. I couldn’t justify the file size. So I shot in the H.265 codec.

I used 3 main LUTs (Look Up Tables). A LUT is basically a colour profile, a preset created by a colorist that you can apply to footage to get a certain look. I used one LUT that favours yellows and oranges that I applied to footage shot at sunset. One LUT for footage shot at night that has a cooler tone with deeper blacks. And one more neutral LUT for footage I shot of the TV or the projector. I messed around with the values and colours of each individual clip in the Lumetri colour panel after applying these LUTs until the footage looked the way I wanted it.

I also graded a lot of the anime clips to make the blacks deeper, and increase contrast and saturation. You can see what I mean in the shots below. All done in Lumetri Colour.

Original image of Rei's eye on the left vs my colour grade. I wanted to make the reds and blacks deeper. I used the dream haze filter again to smooth out the pixellated edges.

Update: Since writing this article the grading for the whole video has been redone. I ran into an issue with the colour grading that resembled an issue I had with the sound mixing for the Richard Williams video. The sound mixing was by far the hardest part of making the Richard Williams video - I made over 120 different sound mixes and the whole process took a month of working everyday on it for 6-12 hours. I mixed the sound using Audio Technica M50X headphones for roughly the first 60 mixes. But I realised that these headphones were terrible for mixing because the mix sounded completely different on other devices. I had to scrap all my work and start from scratch again using my speakers.

I colour graded the Night Falls video using a colour accurate monitor and the grading looked good on it. As soon as I was about to make the video public though, I played the video on a cheaper monitor I had and it looked awful. The image looked washed out, some of the effects were very pixellated - it had a completely different feel. So this is the benefit of watching your edit on different devices before releasing it. I turned down and crushed the blacks in almost every shot in the video to fix the problem.

Editing Notes

Intro

- I wanted to start with live action to make an impression. I tried to create a sense of progression. Moving from sunset to night. Mid shot of leaves to close up to extreme close up. Shots of bokkeh in the windows of buildings to pure bokkeh. The finished product came after a lot of reshoots, experimenting with different shots and shot orders. Although the timing of the cuts stayed the same for the most part.

- Grain and film burns were overlaid onto the bokkeh at the end of this section. I shot the bokkeh myself by pointing my camera with a macro lens at lit up office buildings at night and going out of focus.

- I like the aspect ratio expanding into full screen at the end of the intro. I think it makes the shift into animation feel more otherworldly. I mess around with aspect ratio later in the video too. All live action footage before the 3rd chorus is in anamorphic widescreen, meaning there are black bars across the top and bottom of the image. This is because most of the footage was shot with an anamorphic lens which, produces this kind of horizontally stretched image (although I did use an anamorphic mask that I made in photoshop to make non-anamorphic shots appear anamorphic). In the 3rd chorus and the lead up to it I made the live action footage full screen for emphasis.

Verse 1

- I wanted the animation to continue and expand on the mood set by the live action, so I used clips with lot of negative space, that had a lot of emptiness or stillness in them. These clips also try to emulate a “photographic” look by overlaying things like lens flares and light leaks - elements that you can see in the live action footage I shot.

- The shot where the girls are walking through the forest is reversed to better match the shot of the two boys walking over the bridge.

- I like the progression of the shots filmed from inside the train going past a building. A bright light (in this case the sun) being used as a transition into the animation mirrors the same thing happening at the end of the intro.

- Visual theme of circles and things in the middle of the frame here. Close ups of detail.

- I think these kinds of shots create mood well because they’re easier to identify with. That shot of Yuji in the car aside, I like to use clips that don’t use identifiable shots of characters in places like this to set a mood. The idea is that if I use footage of a very identifiable character like Naruto, the shot feels more about him as a character and less about the feel. I felt the shot of Yuji in the car worked well because in that cut he feels like less of a character and more of an object the viewer is supposed to project themselves onto. The feel of the shot reminds me of riding through the city in cars a kid. The shot of Obito I feel works because he also feels like less of a character here. More like he’s part of the background, and an object for the effects to be overlaid onto.

- The transition at the end of the section works nicely I think because the girl’s face starts in the same part of the frame as the Persona 3 MCs. The motion of her surfacing dissipates the tension in the previous shots in time with the chorus kicking in.

Chorus 1

- I decided to use clips from the Tekken Tag Tournament opening early on given its influence on the feel of the video.

- This shot progression, from Kazuya to the cut with the tentacles, is a bit strange and came out of an earlier editing idea I had. I was initially going to go from Kazuya into another shot from this Fate commercial. Of a man sitting with his back to the camera, tentacles appearing behind him. Then the shot of the tentacles expanding would come after. So the shot progression would have been: Kazuya (stern middle aged man) > stern middle aged man with tentacles > tentacles expanding. This ended up not feeling as good as I wanted. Too many tentacles. When playing around with things here I landed on putting the clip of the tentacles expanding right after Kazuya and for some reason this stuck. I think it works, strangely, even though there’s seemingly not much parity between the clips. I think it’s the motion. The buttery smooth motion of Kazuya lifting his head plays at a very similar pace to the tentacles at the beginning of the shot. The tentacles then get faster as the shot progresses, taking the speed seen in the Tekken footage and building on it. Both clips also feel moody and stylish in similar ways.

Early draft of the shot progression would have gone Kazuya then the shot in the middle here before the large tentacle shot

- The shots from Tekken and Fate are all artificially cropped to match the aspect ratio of the live action. It makes them look more filmic.

- I like the shots of the projector on the ball. The flash in time with the music and the ball coming into focus works nicely I think.

- Not much to say about the shots from the Eve Music Video and the donghua opening other than that this section was set in stone early on and it's a quintessesntial example of the that stylish feel I was going for in the video as a whole.

Bridge 1

- I recently saw On the Beach at Night Alone and loved it. I thought this line would be great to use as a sample. Like I mentioned earlier, the song has themes of loneliness, yearning for love and fulfilment in the city and the quote touches on that.

- This introduces the framing device of seeing video on a TV. I think my goal with this was to show the emotions of the shots inside the TV coming to life in some way. Shots where footage is seen on TV soon give way to full frame footage of the same thing. I think the shot progression in this part of the song works well. The shots of the lights in the trees reflect the quote. You go from shots of leaves on a TV that feel cold, where the only detail you can see as the phosphors that make up the CRT screen. Into warm, soft bokkeh lights in those same trees in detail, with more and more soft bokkeh filling the frame. It’s like the viewers’ feelings towards the tree are changing. You’re finding joy in in something that used to feel cold in the way that the character in the movie just talked about.

- This transitional section into the 2nd verse took a long time to work out. In the end I decided to make it look like a film reel starting up. Various filters and blend modes are applied to all  layers of the footage with the goal being to have the downward momentum generated by the letters cascading down the screen be dissipated by the slow motion water droplet I shot right after.

Verse 2

- I edited the clips so that Tuesday’s movements complement the song. Specifically, the timing of her walk, her turning her head and flipping her hair. I also timed her moving up the stairs in a rhythm that gells nicely with the song. Pretty simple, I just cut certain clips short and started others halfway through to my liking.

- My initial idea here was to film slow motion footage of birds in flight to follow the shots of Tuesday. But I don’t know anything about wildlife photography and finding a flock of birds around sunset that I’d be able to film in a way I wanted was harder than I thought. I thought this shot of the cast iron fence at sunset worked in its place given the cast iron fence in the shot before the last.

- This City Hunter sequence was tricky. I got the idea and the timing of the cuts down early. But I realized later on that I could adjust the black balance to make the background pure black, not the ugly dark grey colour it was at first. This looked great for the 2nd and 3rd shots. It also let me reframe those shots. I zoomed in on the shot of the two characters walking past each other and the fairy touching the water to make them more impactful. But I couldn’t zoom in on the shot of the main character walking next to the waves because I’d lose too much of the great animation. And unless I zoomed in, adjusting the black balance would make it look like his shadow abruptly cuts off. It also created a pixelated halo around the water. I knew that keeping the background here grey when it would be black in the later shots would look off. So, I thought I’d use a framing device that would explain why it looks different. I wanted to make it look like it was filmed in a TV. I tried filming this shot in my TV like I did with other shots, but it didn’t work well. It was too short a shot to justify showing it in my TV I thought. I decided to create the outline of a TV around the footage and zoom in slightly to match the motion of the character walking towards the viewer. I think it works well enough, better than keeping it with a dark grey background with no framing device at least.

The City Hunter Shots before and after reframing

- I overlaid the fairy in the City Hunter section a second time for emphasis.

Original animation on the left vs my edit on the right

- The section of the cars passing by the camera was reshot a few times. I liked this end version the best, where you just see the cars as bokkeh lights. Again, this was achieved just by pointing a macro lens at cars and going very out of focus.

- I like the transition from the live action footage into Spider-verse. The progression of this shot was tricky. My initial idea was to go from a live action shot of a train rushing past me to the shot in Spider-Verse. But this edit didn’t have the energy I wanted. I went through my clip collection to see if I could find another train shot that could transition into it well. The closest one I could find was a shot from Blood the Last Vampire of a train’s wheels speeding down the tracks. But it still didn’t give the effect I wanted. So I played around with various things – compositing different overlays and film burns, zooming in on the Spider-verse clip at the start then zooming out to create a sense of progression (influenced by the Tekken Tag opening like I talked about earlier). The final edit shows elements of all stages of this idea. The live action footage before Spider-verse is a shot of the entrance of Wynyard train station. The next shot is actually an out of focus water bottle in a vending machine on the train platform. The movement in the shot comes from me slowly bringing the water bottle into focus. Then a film burn effect overlay that I got from a pack online comes over the footage until then you see a heavily post processed train from Blood the Last Vampire speeding across the screen for an instant, revealing a close up of Miles in his hoodie.

Chorus 2

- This section took a while to plan and execute. I took it one step at a time. I thought that League of Legends shot was a good way to follow on from the Spider-Verse one. It takes the downwards momentum and brings it to completion. It turns Mile’s downward momentum into a raindrop that splatters. I thought it would be great to follow this with shots of rain to continue with this idea. It’s been an unusually rainy start of the year in Sydney so I didn’t have to wait long to get these rain shots. The only difficulty was I had was trying to keep the camera dry.

- I came up with the idea of how to follow this later on. I thought the cascading out of focus fire effects on the LED screens were reminiscent of the rain in previous shots. These shots of LEDs were shot outside various bars around Chinatown that advertised VIP Clubs on these LED banners. They played a few different animations that I filmed on a macro lens, making various different movements and changing the focus as I filmed.

- What you see in the final shot of this chorus are the flashing lights of an out of focus cleaning truck.

Bridge 2

- Things getting more heated. Fast cuts to build action. Showing footage that is constrained in some way (shown in a TV) before the climax where footage is multiplied through reflections. In other words, creating tension here that will be released in the songs climax.

- I wanted max city pop feel. Full spectrum city pop dominance. So I went for older, more iconic feeling clips here and in the last two choruses for emphasis. I’ve been sitting on some of these clips for a long time (I think it’s been 5 years that I’ve been wanting to use that glass shattering clip). Stream of consciousness editing style here where I just tried to match the feel/action/momentum as I went on.

- The transitional effect here with the bokkeh, followed up with the bokkeh overlaid with graphics and the shot from Animatrix took the longest time to execute out of all the sections in the video. It came after a lot of experimentation with different effects and blend modes.

Chorus 3

- Came up with this idea while looking up music video effects. I saw the kaleidoscope lens filter and thought it would be cool to film anime clips with it. Editing the shot progression in this section was done over 2 nights.

- Footage shot through a prism is intercut with normal footage for emphasis and variety. A dream haze effect is used on most of the kaliedoscoped vision to make it look more dream like.

- I extended the shot of Rei’s eye blinking with a trick I’ve been doing for a while now. This shot is extremely short so I took a screenshot of the first and last frames and put them on either side until it was as long as I wanted. It’s a great way to extend the length of animation that doesn’t have much movement.

Chorus 4

- This section took a long time to figure out. What I landed on was an extended version of the same effect as in Chorus 3 with film burn overlays and the added effect of overlaying irl footage of city lights that I had shot in a prism over prism shot footage. It expands on the feel of the previous section while feeling noticeably different.

- I’m very happy with this transitional effect at the end here as well. Famous cuts from well known 90s anime (Ghost in the Shell > Metropolis > Berserk > Perfect Blue > Memories) and  cut together quickly with flashy filmic effects.

- I shot a lot of great footage during the day time and was frustrated I didn’t have a place to use it earlier in the video because of the focus on night and sunset. I thought this part of the song was the most appropriate place to put it. These peaceful day time shots near the end bring the themes set earlier in the video full circle. You’ve made it through the night, and all the footage that expresses yearning for happiness, and have emerged into a peaceful tomorrow. “Another morning comes".

Ending

- Quiet shots of sparse nighttime environments with the ambience of distant traffic. I thought it was relaxing, reminiscent of the ending of my Liquid MAD.

- The credits play over a shot of the Sydney skyline taken from Bradley's Head. The original plan was for the credits to play over a shot of my sakuga crystal ball at Barangaroo. But this shot had terrible noise and artifacting problems when it was played on some monitors so I replaced it.

The original shot that was going to play over the credits