Transcripts
1. Introduction: [MUSIC] The ideas and opportunities of making
videos is endless. That starting point
where you sit down and you start putting
together a mood board and color schemes and building
out a playlist that is my happy place [MUSIC]. Hi, my name is Becki Peckham. I am one half of the YouTube
channel Becky and Chris. We make videos for the
Internet about photography, video, graphic design, travel. We make videos about our life. Today's class is all about developing your signature
style through your videos. Developing your own
signature style will help you stand
out from the crowd in this super-saturated
world of social media. The end goal here is for
somebody to see a piece of your work and recognize it as yours without even
seeing who posted it. Today we're going to be talking about the techniques that I have learned over the years on how to develop your signature
style in your videos. We're going to be talking
through setting your tone before even starting filming, pacing, editing, choosing music. Then after we're going
to talk about creating a cohesive look on all your
social media channels. If you're just getting
into making videos, you understand how
your camera works, but you want to up
your production value. This class is for you because
we're going to deep dive into how to improve your
videos in the edit. I hope by the end
of this class you walk away feeling confident and inspired to start developing
your own personal style. Super excited that
you've showed up today. Let's get started. That's
so weird. Let's go.
2. Standing Out Online: All right, welcome to our class. I'm so excited that
you guys are here. This is a big step
investing your time into learning a new craft
or expanding your skills. By taking classes like this, you really start to take little nuggets away and store
them in your back pocket. This is how you start
to develop style, ideas that you can implement in your
videos going forward. We're going to talk about style. What even is style? Style is the visual language that you use to tell a story. Style can really mean
a lot of things. It could be the way
your videos are edited, the music choices
that you're using, the fonts and titles that
you're using in your videos, what's actually in the shots. Also, the colors that you're
incorporating in your set. The way you color
grade your videos, and the types of shadow
tinting you might use, or the way you shoot
your videos in terms of a picture profile
that you want to choose. These things all play into style and the way
your videos look. Oftentimes we're drawn to
certain types of films, or certain YouTube channels
based on the way they look. This might not always
be obvious to you, but take note next time you're watching a video or a movie. If you like it, really analyze
the shot and try to figure out why you like it to see how
style plays into the shot. Knowing what your style is, is not going to
happen right away, so don't worry if you don't
have a style right now. It all comes together with time. When it comes to style, there's no right or wrong
way to go about it. It's all based on
personal preference. The more things that you
include in your shot that you like that represent you make your shot more unique and more on-brand for yourself. You might be asking yourself, "Why should I care about style? Why is this important?" There's a couple of
reasons for this. One is to be uniquely yourself. It's difficult to set yourself apart from
everybody else online. Social media is so
block full of content. Coming up with your own style or developing your own
style that represents you is going to make
you stand out from the crowd and make it
a little more unique. Also, it offers a little
bit of structure as well. When you're not really sure what format you should go with, with your videos, or what
to be posting on Instagram, or what your thumbnails
should look like. When you have a style in place, it's almost like
a little guide to show you what direction
to go in when it comes to developing
those thumbnails or developing video ideas
for your channel. When I started a
YouTube channel, it was basically just
a documentary life. There was no real direction, and the stories ended up being just this running gun
mishmash of document life. This is a family memory video. There wasn't really
a value-added moment to these videos that
we were making. Over time, as we developed
style in the edit, it gave us a framework into figuring out what kinds of videos we're
going to be making, and how to tell those
stories properly. For example, we have a couple of different formats
we use on our channel. We have a vlog format
which is just running gun. We just follow whatever
the story is happening, but it's color graded in a way that matches all
of our other videos, as well as the thumbnail matches the rest of the thumbnails
on our YouTube channel. But then when it
comes to a tutorial, that's a little bit more
of a structuring style of video where we either answer a question or give a problem at the
beginning of the video, and then we want to answer that problem or question
during the video, which is a value or
takeaway moment. Then we have a title
screen that comes down, and now we know when we are making a tutorial
or project video, that that's the format
we're going to go in, and now we know exactly
what we need to shoot and say in that video to deliver that format in that specific style
that we've chosen. Then when it comes
to storytelling, there's even different styles
and editing that we like to rely on when it
comes to those things. For example, when something
funny is happening, we like to toss in a really silly track, and just like hold
on clips or zoom in on little facial expressions to hopefully make the
audience laugh. Those moments for me, the entertainment
factor is the value. Or if we want to flip and talk about something
a little more serious, we can look at this clip where it's a little
bit more of a serious, faster pace conceptual
type of edit. This is how my work
schedule looks. Five-thirty A.M, sky-train, get to the hospital at 6:00 A.M, prepare for rounds, 6:37 A.M, accept those patients,
get a visit. There's still some style there
that works with our look because it's color graded in the way that we color
grade all of our videos. We're also using fonts that
we use in other videos. These are ways that we've
pulled style into our edits, and it makes some of
these big decisions a lot easier when you're making
videos every single week. We're going to be using my style as an example in today's class, but my style is not
going to be the same as your style, and that's okay. That's why we're going to be talking through these
techniques and concepts, so you can use your
own unique eye to create your own
style for your videos. There are a number of
concepts that we're going to talk about
in today's class. The first one being,
setting your tone. This all happens before
filming takes place because this is where the style is
really going to be developed. I'm also going to
throw in a couple of tips on how you can art direct your own videos using
props and wardrobe. We're also going to
be talking about editing, so assembly, pacing, putting together that puzzle, bringing that style through, and just improving storytelling
right in the edit. Then we're going
to touch on music and the importance
of sound design. This is where that style
is coming through as well. The type of music
you're going to choose for your video will play through in how your
video feels to your audience. We're going to briefly touch on color grading and how you can bring that style
through the color palette in your videos. This can go as in-depth or
not in-depth as you like, we'll touch on that later. We're going to talk
about titles and visual effects and how you can incorporate some of those
things without having to use after-effects or
understand animation. Then towards the
end, we're going to talk about expanding your style, creating this cohesive look and brand throughout all your
social media platforms, Instagram, YouTube, and
your website, even. We're going to be
pulling in a couple of examples from my channel. The first being our most recent helicopter travel series
called heading east, where we created this five
episodes series which we fully branded out from the logo
to the color scheme, the art direction of the videos, and then the whole edit itself. Then we're going to see
how that contrasts with something a little more
simpler like a vlog. If you want to follow
along by picking up an old project that may be is feeling a
little bit stale, you can use some of the concepts
that we talked about in today's video to
rework that project. You can use whatever
editing software you like. I'm going to be using
Adobe Premiere Pro because that's my favorite, but the concepts apply no
matter what you're using. You don't need to be
a professional editor to follow along
on today's class. You just have to have
the camera basics down part and understand how
editing software works. Then we're going to
talk through how to incorporate style
into your edits. You have a couple of new
tools that you can play with when you go to
edit your next video. If you're looking to level up your editing skills or up
your production value, this class will definitely
help you do that. We'll help you create a cohesive look
throughout your channel, throughout your social media and set you apart from
everyone else. What I want you
to do now is pick an old project that you
need to rework or look at with fresh eyes and
get ready because in the next lesson we're
going to talk about setting your tone
in your videos, and then later we're going
to get into editing.
3. Setting Your Tone: We're going to be talking all about setting the
tone for your video, and this is the step that
happens before we even pick up the camera before
we even start filming. This is like the planning
stage of your video, where you figure out what the
video is going to be about, what the vibe of the
video is going to be, what the style of the
video is going to be. These are all things that help
set the tone of the video, which will help you plan
out your shortlist and your shooting script before you actually set up your camera. Back when I started
my YouTube channel, I didn't know that setting the tone for your videos was
important, and therefore, I didn't have a direction in which to follow when
shooting my videos. One of the first
videos I publish on my channel on February 10th, 2015, this is now
a private video, so you can't go and watch it, I basically compiled
a bunch of clips from a room project that I did
and paired it to music. It's not great, we're going
to play it. What is this? [MUSIC] My husband looks really cute dancing.
That's really sweet. We've had enough
that. What is that? The shots are overexposed. I just picked a song and
put the clips in it. There's no sound design, there's no diegetic sounds. You can't actually hear
what's happening in the room. There's this disconnect feeling between me watching the video and what's happening
in the video. No tone was set, no
purpose was set. It was just clips edited
as a montage to music, which can work in
some instances. But we were doing a DIY project. There was no tutorial
portion of this video. There was no, here's how you do it, here's what we're using. In this case, setting
our tone before we had shot the video or
figuring out what our video was going to be in
the format of said video would've helped the viewer take away something
from that video, so would've helped the
viewer understand what was happening and would've helped the viewer learn how to do this project by just
watching the video, but instead they just got a
montage and some dancing. Now when I'm making videos, I ask myself a
couple of questions before I even get started, and this is the planning
portion of the video. I'll ask myself first, what is this video
going to be about? I'll actually write
down what that video is going to be about. The next question is, how do
I want to present this idea? Is it in a tutorial format? Is it in a blog format? Is it like a mix of both? That's the decision you need to make before you
start filming. The next question is,
who is the audience? This is going to
determine as well how you present the
ideas in your video. Then the next one is music. What's the vibe going to be? Is this going to be a
fast-paced, fun video? Is it going to be more
of a serious video? Is it a tutorial? Does it need a soft sound track or are we trying to
generate some hype? Do we need a really
exciting track? Lastly, we need to
decide on the look. What is the branding going to be or the color
scheme going to be, or even like the fonts, if you're lucky enough
to be handling the entire production
end-to-end yourself. You get to make all the
artistic decisions, the edit, the final
music choices. It's really exciting because the opportunities are
endless and what you put in your video and how you edit
your video is all based on your personal preferences and the vibe and tone that
you're trying to go for it. There's a couple of decisions
that we can make to pull that art direction
through your videos. We touch on this earlier, but
let's talk about it again. We're talking about the
colors that are in the shot, so in this shot here, we've got neutral muted tones. This is my personal
preference and this come to be known that this
is my brand now, people expect matte
black from me. Therefore, matte black shows
up in a lot of our shots. That's our color and that's the art direction
style we go in. You can bring in colors in
your clothing, your wardrobe, the accessories that
are in your shot, the props, the wall color, or even backdrop
paper that you're using in your shot
really can make a difference in the way
your shot looks and in the way that your shot
color grades as well. Lighting is another
thing that plays into tone and style as well. For a studio shot like this, I like a nice
bright light on me. I don't like a lot of
harsh shadows on my face, but if I wanted to have a little bit more of
a casual style video, then I might opt to light
my shot with window light, which is free and
also beautiful, but feels a little
bit more relatable depending on what
your audience is. It really depends on
personal preference and how you want to
deliver the content. We talked all about setting
your tone for your video, and it could feel a
little bit overwhelming. Let's break this down
a little bit further. I just have pulled up here my little mood board for our helicopter
series heading east. This is something
that I put together before I even start
working on the video, before I even start
filming anything. This mood board gives you an idea of the vibe and the tone of what the series
is going to be just based on color palette,
based on fonts. I have some notes here that says who the audience
is going to be. In this case, it was anyone interested in a unique
travel experience. The audience ranges from 20-40 years old and they're mostly male
because in the past, that's usually what our
helicopter videos draw, is a male audience. I got a couple of notes here
as well on music choices. I know I want to use blues
and rock music and then find different pacing
within that genre to help with storytelling. High-energy parts
of the videos and maybe some lower slower
energy parts of the videos. Moving down, we have a color
palette of, once again, muted tones, but we're bringing
in more earth tones here. Our normal branding or color
scheme is usually black, white, gray as you
see in the set. But for Heading East, we went
in a different direction. We went with a more muted
khaki earth tones here. Moving down here, we have some sample textures
and patterns. This is really
important to me as a former graphic
designer to start to create these different elements that I can pull
from when it comes to creating social assets
say for Instagram, Instagram stories
or even titles. I can pull on these
textures and patterns to really bring that vibe through
the rest of the materials. When you're making videos, there's not often a
lot of opportunities to show graphics because
we're showing video, we're showing moving things. But when it comes to social
assets, Instagram posts, social media, things
that you're going to be using to advertise
your content. That's when you can really drive home the tone through graphics, through color schemes
and through textures. I also have a couple
of fonts chosen here. As a designer, I don't recommend going with
more than two fonts. I have three or four here. Gets a little sticky when
you're getting into fonts, but choose two fonts
that work nice together and then keep those consistent throughout
your entire video. I also have here
some sample imagery and this is just a
reference to show me like, this is the color scheme. This is the way we want
to go with the branding, the color grading, and post. How we want to post-process
our images for Instagram. Then I got a little graphic here that shows a line
drawing of a map, which is also inspiration
for the series. Spending some time to nail down a little bit of a
mood board can really help visualize a cohesive look and a full brand for the series. You might be looking
at this and thinking, this seems like a waste of time. This is really
overwhelming, but in fact, it's actually quite
enjoyable to make yourself your hot
beverage of choice. Sit down and just
enjoy the process. Putting the work upfront
will actually have you making fewer decisions
later on down the road. When your head is
wrapped up in filming, and shortlist, and what is this video, and
what is the story, and what is the concept,
you're not going to have a lot of mental
space to think about, what's the color scheme, what
color should be wearing, what has to go in
the background? Now you have this mood board to reference while
you're shooting or developing your shot
list or your storyboards. It's just one less
thing you have to think about while you're
planning your videos. Something else I like to do, which actually really helps you immerse yourself
in a project is, I'll go through and
develop a full playlist of a genre of music
with different tempos. For instance, with Heading East, I picked blues and rock music. I just went through my favorite music platform and
just build out an entire playlist of music that fit that vibe
that I was going for. Then I actually listened
to that playlist while I'm developing
the mood board, while I'm designing
things for the videos, while I'm even
planning the videos. It really helps when it comes to planning because
you can wrap your head around an entire vibe and just feel it throughout the
entire planning process. That's not the only way you
can make a mood board look. I want to show you a
contrasting example of another style of video I do call the focal
length challenge, where we just shoot a focal
length and talk about it. This style of video, the format is a studio section, a blog section, and then back in the studio section, and
then we show images. My mood board here still has that color scheme and it has
the fonts I'm going to use. But instead of
patterns and textures, I have sample icons here. That's just bringing
it a little bit of a different style and
it's an opportunity to bring through a
little bit more of a branded moment
that matches a logo. Then below I have the
series thumbnails, so I have three
thumbnails here so I can see that there's
a consistency. I know the next time I
do a video like this, this is exactly how the
thumbnail is going to look, and this is a type of
photo I need to shoot. Now it is your turn to do this. I've actually included a PSD and a PDF in the
class resources. I encourage you to go download those and
play around with them a little bit and start creating your own mood boards
for your project. If you're working on that video project that
you're struggling with, I recommend going on Pinterest
and just starting with looking at images
that inspire you, whether it's just
color schemes or even photography and to start pinning things or saving things. Then you can start building
your mood board from there. In the next lesson, we're going to
dive into assembly and pacing and we
can start to put that whole tone concept
together in the edit. [MUSIC]
4. Project Setup and Assembly : We talked about, about style, but sometimes style isn't just about what's in the shot
and what you're wearing, style can actually come
through in the edit as well. When it comes to video editing, setting up your project and making sure that
your project is organized and color-coded
is so important. When you look at the timeline, you can say that there is this camera because
it's this color. It's key. That's my biggest tip. We're going to look at a portion of our
heading east project. This is actually the
intro section to episode one and I'm just
going to use that as an example and we talked
about this project when we talked about the mood board
so let's dive into it. I have a number of bins
here for different things. We'll just walk through them.
VO, which is voice over. That's the voice over
part of the video. We have a folder for titles, a folder for sound effects, one for sequences and music. This here is the
actual sequence. Then we have the
footage and within the footage folder I always organize my
footage by camera. In here you can see I
have the folder for GoPro and a folder for my A7S3, which is my main camera. Within these folders is all of the footage
from the shoot. In the GoPro folder there's
only one clip in here, but in the A7S3 folder we
have two days of shooting. For me and my workflow, It's important that I
import my footage per shoot day and then within that shoot day is all of
the files from that shoot. Now, some people might
have a different workflow. If you'd prefer to
do day 1, day 2, day 3 instead of the actual
date, that's okay too. Just do whatever works best for you and that makes
the most sense. I'm just going to
start at the top my bin and we're going to
just color code down. This is my formula.
Feel free to pick whatever colors you want
that make the most sense. I'm just going to go ahead and right-click and we're
going to come down to label and I'm just going
to tag that as Caribbean. For titles, I'm going to come down and label those as tan. Sound effects
sequences and music, I'm going to tag those
all as Caribbean as well. We're going to tag
the actual edit, the sequence that we're going
to be editing in as green. Then we're going to open up the footage folder and
we're going to see our GoPro folder and
our A7S3 folder. This is actually one of the
most important color tagging parts when you have
different cameras that require different types
of color grading. I always take my GoPro clips as green so come down here
and tag those as green. Then my A7S3 clips always
stay as a color iris. If I had some footage in this bin here that
was slow motion, say shot at 60
frames per second, I would tag that as
mango and then interpret that footage to 24 frames per seconds so it played
back slow motion. Don't feel like you have to use my color labeling
format as yours. Pick your own, pick the
colors that you like. If you don't like
green, choose pink, magenta, wherever works. Just make sure that
it's consistent for every single project you do so no matter what project you open, you know exactly what's footage, what's titles, and what is
a sequence in your bin. We now have our
project bin setup, everything is color coded,
we're all organized, now we're ready to jump
into the timeline. We are going to create
a new sequence based on the settings in which we
shoot our main camera angles. For me, I shoot everything on my A7S3 in 4K 4210 bit
at 24 frames per second. In order to start
a new timeline, you just come down
to new item and go sequence and then
this window pops up, you're going to come
over to settings, and this is where you're going
to change your parameters. You're going to put
in all your settings in which you've shot your video. But the easier way to do
this to ensure that you have the proper timeline
settings is actually just take a clip from
your main angle and just drag it and drop it right into the thing that
says right here, drop media here to
create sequence. Foolproof way to make sure that your sequence
settings are correct. In order to do that, you
open up your footage, A7S3 is my main camera angle, drag it and drop it, and the sequence settings
match my main camera angle. We're just going to
close out real quick because that's not the
sequence we're going to use. We're going to use
this one here, which is already partially edited. Now we're going to
start going through footage and adding choice
clips to the timeline. Culling footage or going through
your footage can be very overwhelming and you don't really need to think about
the edit at this point. This is just getting your
favorite choice clips that work with the tone and vibe of your video and your outline, and getting them down
into the timeline. What I like to do here is open my clips up in
the source window, and I'll play through them
sending in and out points for the choice portions
of the clip that I like and then I'll send those
down into the timeline. I've opened this clip and you'll see this looking a
little bit gray. We shot this footage in SLAG-3, so it has a very flat
look and we'll talk about bringing back that
contrast when we talk about color grading. I'll start at the very
beginning of the clip. I'll use the space
bar to press play. As soon as we find a portion
of that clip that we want, I'm going to hit
I on my keyboard to set an in point
and then I'm going to continue playing until
that part of the clip is over that I want to keep. I'll hit O my keyboard
to set an out point, and then I'll hit the
comma keyboard command and send that directly
down into the timeline. Using keyboard commands,
especially at this phase in the editing
stage is super key. It'll make this whole
process go a lot faster. I'll do this for
every single clip in my project whether it's
one day of shooting, 10 days of shooting. It might be a lot of footage in the timeline and it can get
a little bit overwhelming, but doing it this
way ensures that you have key clips down
into your timeline so that once you've gone through all your footage and put your choice clips
down in the timeline, you can start all the way
back at the beginning and watch it through in two x, two x speed and just start
cutting out the bulk, cutting out the
things that are not necessary to the story, not necessary to the vision, to the value that you're trying to get through
in your video. Once you get your entire
timeline cut down, we're going to talk about adding music and sound design
to your videos and how that can really bring your story telling
to the next level. [MUSIC]
5. Music and Sound Design: We're going to dive into
music and sound design. There's a couple of
different ways that you can use music to help drive a story. First is if you have
a genre of music, picking different
types of tracks that have different pacing will really help tell
different emotions in a story. For instance, something that's higher energy might mix with
a more higher energy scene, like going somewhere or doing something that's
really fun and exciting, versus having a slower song where maybe we need to
slow it down a little bit. We're showing maybe a morning scene where we're
just waking up, there's a sunrise happening and it's a little
bit more relaxing. You can use a bunch of
different types of music in one genre to help pull
the tone through a story, but then also give the
audience their ups and downs with the emotions that you're trying to get across
in your video. The second thing you want
to keep in mind when you're using music with your videos is that if you have dialogues and if you're
vlogging or you're doing a tutorial and you have an underlying music track there, you want to make sure that
that music track is not too loud and that it's not
competing with your voice over. There's nothing worse
than when you turn on a YouTube video to try and learn something
and the music track is so loud that you could
barely focus or hear what the teacher
is trying to teach. For YouTube, you want
to make sure that your voice track is set to about minus 12 decibels and
that your music track is at least minus 21 or lower. It's really important
that the music that you're choosing
for the video fits with the pacing of your edit and the vibe that you're
trying to go for. We usually like to use Chillhop type music on our
channel for the majority of our videos because
that's a part of our style and a
part of our brand. But for the helicopter series that we talked
about heading East, we'll use a lot of
blues and rock tracks, as we mentioned in that mood
board section of this class. We're going to look at this
example from a section of Episode 5 of our helicopter
series heading East. As I mentioned, we already built out this playlist so I'm picking songs from the
playlists that match the mood board and the
vibe that we're going for. I also want to make sure that
any edit we're including sounds that you would normally hear in a scenario where we are, but then also amplifying
some of these moving camera transitions
with whooshes and things like that just
to amplify that edit. We have the edit finished here, the sound design is
done, it's all mixed, but we're just going
to break it down. I'm going to show you how
some of these sound effects and diegetic sounds help
bring the story across. Here's the edit. After watching that, you can start to break down a couple of these little
sound effects that we added, like the sound of the plane
flying through the air, the sound of the
helicopter firing up. We're including those sounds in the video because if
they were missing, you will feel a disconnect between the video and the
audience watching it. They won't feel
like they're there. There's elements missing. Including these sounds that
would normally be in a video is really important in
helping tell a story. If we scroll over
this airplane clip, you can hear the
airplane in the sky. If that wasn't there, you don't get that essence
of we're at an airport, we're hearing the airplane. It's important to see what's
in the clip and then add sound effects that match
what's in your videos. When it comes to adding other
types of sound effects, if you have whip pans
adding little whooshes to accentuate that
transition can help. For instance, even a time-lapse instead of no sound at all, we can add a little sound
effect that sounds like this. It sounds like the sky
is going by really fast. If you have a point in your edit where you're
doing a whip transition or transitioning
from one clip to another in a bit of
an interesting way, you can accentuate this with sound designer sound effects. For example, we added
a little whoosh in-between here and that
just accentuates the edit. That just adds a little bit of a different element that's not just the normal diegetic
sounds that you're hearing, but it just adds a little
something to the edit that makes it a little
bit more interesting. We're going to have a
look at this edit really quickly with all of the
sound effects turned off. It's just the music track
paired with the visuals. This is a great track, but I like that track a lot. But you're missing that element. You're missing the firing up of the helicopter and hearing the airplane going across
so it really does make a difference having those
sound effects included. When we're looking at
reworking that old project, sometimes it's best to
actually just strip all the music that you
had out and start fresh. We're looking at our mood board, we have our edit done,
we're going to look at it, and now we're going to analyze what better music choices
can I make for this edit? Where can I include
diegetic sounds or sounds that we're hearing
in the video clips? Trees rustling, airplanes
flying by, footsteps, and then how can
we mix that with a proper music track that evokes an emotion to just bring
that edit to the next level? Don't be afraid to try a bunch of different
tracks as well. Sometimes when you're
listening to your playlist, you'll think like, this is
the song, it's so good. Then you pop it in your timeline and you play it back
and you're like, this doesn't match with the
vibe of the edit at all. Don't be afraid to
get rid of that track and try a couple of different
ones to see what fits. I definitely recommend if this is something that you're
going to be doing often to invest in a music
subscription service. This is so important when you're doing commercial videos
or even YouTube videos. You want to have a big
library to choose from, a lot of options so you're not using the same
songs all the time. Then you have options
also to just pull different types of tracks for
different kinds of stories. I have a number of different
resources that I lean on heavily when it
comes to making videos in terms of music. Musicbed is one of my favorites. They have a lot of
high-quality tracks. Epidemic Sound is another one. They have a lot of really
great Chillhop music. They also include stems so you can grab the
instrumental, the melody, the drums just from
your chosen track, so you can use elements
of different kinds of songs to help
build up a story. It also includes
sound effects too, which is super helpful to
have, as we mentioned, sound designer is so
important so having that there as a little
library moment is helpful. PremiumBeat.com is
another one that I like to use if I'm doing
commercial jobs for people, where I need maybe a different
style of music license that covers me for a different
variety of platforms, so that's another
really great one. That's three places
that I lean on heavily. Musicbed, Epidemic Sound,
and PremiumBeat.com. We have our edit completed, the music is in, the sound design is in. We pretty much have a video. Now we really need to polish
it off with color grading. In the next lesson, we're going to walk
through color grading, a little bit of the basics
of the lumetri Color panel, and then how to deal
with log footage, which can be very confusing, so stay tuned for that.
6. Color Grading: Basics: Color grading is a little
bit of a beast in itself. It's something that you're
probably not going to add to your video
workflow if you're just starting out because
the learning curve to learn how to color grade
is quite substantial. This lesson isn't
really going to be a super deep dive into
how to color grade, it's going to be a little
bit of an overview of my process. But if you want to learn how to color grade your
videos from start to finish, we'll use some classes in the class resources down below, and you can check those out
and continue your learning. Color grading is the last step you're going to want to do
when you finish your edit. You know exactly
what the vibe is, you know what the edit
looks like, the types of music you've chosen. The color grade is going
to add a little bit of interest and
style to your edit, and this is where we can pull style through your
whole channel and have your videos have a
recognizable feel and tone based on your
look and your branding. Now, with color
grading, it could be as complicated or as simple
as you want it to be. I'll walk you through a little
bit of my workflow here. We're back in Episode 1 of our helicopter
series, Heading East. This is the intro.
I'm going to use the Lumetri Color panel to
color grade my video here, but you can use whatever
software you're using. The concepts apply, the tools will look
slightly different, but exposure, white
balance, curves, these are all things
that should be accessible in your
color grading program. As I mentioned, we shoot all
of our videos in S-Log3, and we do this to capture the most dynamic range
possible in a clip. You'll see that the
footage coming out of the camera is super flat. You don't have the shoot log. This is definitely
personal preference. If you choose not to
shoot log and you just want to shoot a standard
picture profile, definitely make sure
that your images are exposed properly
in camera because clipped highlights and
clipped shadows are a tell-tale sign of an
amateur-looking video. A clipped highlight means
that you're overexposing your highlights and clipped shadow means
you're underexposing. You want to make
sure that you expose correctly in camera if
you're not going to be doing a lot of post-processing
or shooting log and converting it and doing the
full color grading process. The first thing I
like to do when I start color grading my videos, we've got everything color-coded and set up so that when we start adding in our
adjustment layers , everything is organized. The first thing I like
to do is bring in that utility light and convert
my log footage to Rec. 709. I'll just add
an adjustment layer. I like to work on
adjustment layers because I can use one adjustment globally for the entire timeline versus having to edit
every single clip. This is up to you, personal preference on workflow
that you choose to do. This is what works for us. People tend to do it a
little bit differently, so it's up to you to choose what is the best
workflow for you. I'll take that adjustment
layer and I will pop it on top of my
footage and drag it over my entire timeline
because I know that all of this IRIS-tagged footage
is A7S III shot in S-Log. On this adjustment layer, I'm going to add my utility LUT, a LUT stands for lookup table, and that's just going to
add back in that contrast. It's like a
mathematical equation, almost like a curve
that you're putting on top of your footage to
bring back that contrast. Now, I don't actually
recommend using presets and LUTs to color
grade your footage, but when it comes to
converting log to Rec. 709, their utility LUT is a great use case
for using a preset. If you are not shooting log, this does not apply to you. If you're not shooting
log, just hang on, we'll talk a little bit
about that in a second. Using the Creative tab in
the Lumetri Color panel, I'm going to add that
utility LUT here, and that's going to
bring back contrast to our log footage. This is actually a
custom LUT that we built for our Sony footage, so these are all
available on our website. The link is in the
class resources. We're going to add that here. You can see that as
soon as we added that, it brought back contrast. If I turn it off,
it's very flat, and if I turn it back on, it's bringing back contrast. Now that we have the
utility LUT added, we're going to start doing
the basic color correction. I also like to do this on adjustment layers because
there are some points in some videos that we shoot
where there's one scene with a bunch of clips that
need the same adjustment. It doesn't make sense to individually adjust those clips, we'll just make one
adjustment layer and do one global adjustment
for those clips. I like to put my color
correction adjustment layer below the log to Rec. 709 adjustment layer because I feel like we get the best
results in this way. We're just going to
do the same thing. Drag this adjustment layer
to cover the entire edit, and we'll start chopping
it up as we go through. We're just going to
go right back to the beginning of our clip and
we're just going to start going through and
neutralizing all of the clips and adjusting the exposure so it
all looks good. We're just going to zoom in here and look at this one clip. I'm actually just
going to look at a couple of these
clips to see if they look about the
same, and they do. We're just going to cut
that adjustment layer over these four clips here. We're going to make one
adjustment and see how it looks and then we'll check all of those clips to make
sure that they match. Starting with the first one, we're going to click on
that adjustment layer. We're going to come over to our basic Corrections tab here, and we're just
going to go through and adjust the temperature or the tint to make sure that the
white point looks neutral. Sometimes I like to
start with using the eyedropper tool if there's something that's
neutral in the scene. The car here is white, so I'll take the eyedropper
and just eyedropper the car. Made a little bit of
a difference here. Took some green out of the shot. It slid the temperature
slider towards the more warm tones and it
is looking pretty good. I'm going to just have a look over here
at my scopes and we're going to make any
adjustments to make sure that this shot is
looking neutral. Using the scopes and the parade, I'm going to go through
and adjust my exposure, highlight, shadows,
and contrasts. Again, this is a little
bit outside the scope, no pun intended, of this lesson. [LAUGHTER] Highly
encourage you to go check out a more in-depth color grading course if you want to learn more about
how to properly adjust your images using the
scopes and your RGB parade. I'm just going to go through
and adjust the exposure. It's looking a
little bit bright. We've overexposed because
we were shooting in S-Log3. We're just going to
bring that exposure down a little tiny bit. We're going to adjust
our highlights. Again, I'm looking at
the RGB parade here. I'm making sure
that our highlights aren't touching 100 IRE, and I want to make
sure our shadows aren't hitting zero IRE. We don't want pure
whites and pure black. That's why we shot log, to preserve some of
that dynamic range. Let me go through and
adjust this clip and then we'll come back and have a look at the before and after. [MUSIC] If we turn off
that adjustment layer, you can see it's very
like blue and bright, and a little bit jarring. Then if we turn it back on, it's a little bit more neutral. Now, the whites don't seem like they're completely blown out. You can see a little bit
detail in the car there. Now we'll just continue doing that for the
rest of the footage. We're going to make sure
that all the clips match, all the white
balance is correct, all of the exposure is correct. I'm just going to scroll
over to the next clip. My adjustment looks
decent there, and the next one, decent there. We can move on to
the inside shots. This is going to have a
different correction. We're going to use
the same techniques to go through all
of these clips, neutralize everything,
and that will set us up for color grading. [MUSIC]
7. Color Grading: Style and Tone: Now we're looking at a timeline. We have the primary
color correction done, so all the clips
are neutralized. We've got that
utility lot on here, if you're shooting just a
regular picture profile that's a step you can ignore. We're going to go
ahead and start walking through our
color grading process. This step is really
cool because it's another element where you can bring branding into your videos, style into your videos, tone into your videos, and even start developing a
feeling in the color grade. Let's just go through the
process. It's the same. We're going to add an
adjustment layer here. Again, going to drag that adjustment layer on
top of our entire edit. What you see here in
10, that's our title. We want those to be
on top of everything, we don't want those
to be affected by any adjustment layers
in the timeline. Once again, color grading is going to be
personal preference. It totally depends on
the tone that you've set at the beginning when we talked about planning
your videos, that's going to determine how you're going to color grade. You don't have to do this step. You can just put your video out there
however you want to, but if you want to add some
style style your videos, this is a great way to do that. My process when it comes to
color grading is once we have neutral base point, I'm going to start
adding blue to the shadows and adding a little bit of warmth
to the highlights. Now, you don't have to do this, this is just my
personal preference. Looking at the Color
Wheels and Match Tab here we've got three color wheels:
one for the highlights, one for the mid tones,
and one for the shadows. As we start adjusting
these parameters, they're going to start affecting whatever part of the
image we're selecting. If we go to the
Shadows, Color Wheel, and we start dragging this
target down towards blue, you'll see the shadows
starting to tint blue. Now, we want to be careful, we don't want to go too extreme unless extreme is the
look you're going for, but sometimes easy does
it on the corrections, where you're just adding a
little something different to your shot without
overpowering it with color. Now, a lot of people tend to use lots for this part
of the process, and I actually don't
recommend using lots. They can be a really great
starting point where you can add lots to your footage to see what your
footage can look like, but lots are not a one size
fits all type scenario. Oftentimes that
people develop lots based on a couple of clips and if you apply them to your shot which isn't shot in
the same lighting, or with the same colors, or even with the same cameras, the light might not look
the way it should on your footage as it did from the person
you bought it from. They can be a great
way to learn, but I definitely recommend
learning how to use your tools so you can start developing your own
style from scratch, and honestly, this is
the best way to do it. To understand all of
your tools just makes you an all round better
cinematographer, photographer, videographer. We're going to drop
these back a little bit, maybe bring this down a
little bit to teal color. We turn that off and on, you can see it just added a little something
to the shadows. Same with the mid tones here, we can take this target and go all the way
extreme up to the reds. It's actually affecting most of the image because there's not a lot of highlight and
shadow in this shot. It's a very even exposure. We can double click
this to reset it and bring that up a little tiny bit to just
see what that does. If we turn that off and on, it just makes it a
little interesting. We can go back and add a little bit more
blue to the shadows, and it's all about massaging
the settings here. You don't have to do one adjustment and
then live with it. You can go back and forth, move between the color wheels, and curves, and your exposure, and just adjust it until
you like how it looks. Again down here with
the highlights, we can show you what
that looks like. It doesn't affect
the shadows at all, it's just affecting
the highlights. We can move this to a little
bit more of an orange tone. We turn that on and off, it made a little bit
of a difference here but I'm not loving the tone so open up your curves and start changing
tones here as well. This is just another parameter, another way that you can
adjust colors in your images, just to give you an example, hue vs saturation is
where we can select a certain hue in the image and take down the
saturation of that. This is really helpful, say, if you're shooting with
a GoPro and you have these neon greens or
neon blues in your shot, you can take down the intensity of those colors selectively, and it makes your shots look
a little bit better and it's easier to match that footage to something like from
a Sony camera. Just for an example, if we
make two points here on the curve to select our reds and we just
bring that down, this is not something
that I would do, but just to give you an example, you can see that it
basically desaturated the entire skin tones and then the red and
the stop button. If I turn that on and off, you can see what that did. Curves is a very powerful
tool to add to your arsenal, and you can make a lot
of difference in the way your clips look by using curves. We'll reset that. Again here we can do the same hue vs hue, we can actually select a tone and shift the
hue of that tone, which is really helpful. To give you an example, let's change the
hue of this red. I can use a eyedropper, an eyedropper this red. You can see that it
isolated the red here in the curve
with three points. So if I take that middle
point and just drop it down, you can see that it's changing
the color red to green, or if I move it up, change it to purple or blue. As I move it, you can see
that there's colors that show up here to show you what
hue you're changing it to, which is super helpful when it comes to isolating
certain tones in your images and making them
look a little bit better. We're going to turn
that off because that looks a little bit silly. I could sit here for
another hour or two and tweak out this color grade to make it look
how I want it to. It's all trial and error. You understand the
tools and it's just about reworking the curves, the shadow tinting, and just getting a
look that you like. I'm going to pop open
a project and show you my final color
grade on this. If we look at the same clip
that we were just working on, this is the final color grid that I have here
for heading East. If I turn that off, you can see that it is a
little bit more stylized, we've shifted the hues
a little tiny bit. If we scroll over to even
this GoPro clip here, if I turn off the color grade, you can see that it's neutral, but the blues are very blue, and when we turn on
the color grade, we've actually shifted
those blues to be a bit more of a teal-y
turquoise-y color. That's the joy of using curves. You can push these tones around to make
subtle adjustments in your color that actually make a really big difference
to your end product. Another example of using curves to change the
tones of your colors. If we look at this clip here, you can see there's a bunch of green trees in the background. If I turn off the color grade, you can see that the trees
are actually very green. We've selectively adjusted
the tones in that green, changed them to a
more desaturated, warmer look, which just adds a little bit of a stylistic
look to the color grade. It's a little bit something
different than, say, a normal green that you
would find outside, and it's fun to play around with these tones that
we've set out in our mood board and
try to incorporate them in our color grade
for the end product. That's my basic workflow on
how I color grade a video. I recommend to you to get in there and play
around to just slide the sliders around and see what they do and
manipulate things and just get a feel for
what parameters change what in your image. We just added color
grading to our workflow. Next up, we're going
be talking about titles and visual effects.
8. Titles and Visual Effects: I love adding titles and little slide-down moments to my videos because
it allows me to bring through some of
that visual branding to incorporate the fonts that
I've chosen in my mood board, the color schemes that we chose. This is another
area where you can bring through that
stylistic element. We're going to pull up
this little segment from our helicopter series heading east where we did
these little airport tours. Every time we stopped in
every single episode, we made it really
quick, really fun, and we used the same
music every single time and we used the
same format every time. What I did in this instance, we'll just have a
quick look at it is I designed this slide down to differentiate the
airport tour sequence from the rest of the episode. This will be the
first installment of our airport tour series. [MUSIC]. I designed a little slide
down that just said, this is the airport tour, this is the airport that
we're at and we just use the color schemes
and elements from our mood board in this slide. Now, this is pulling on my
graphic design background. I am not an animator. I don't know how to use
After Effects that well, so the easiest way for me
to incorporate some of these graphic design
elements is by designing these slides either in Photoshop or Illustrator, bringing them in as a JPEG
or an Illustrator file. Then using keyframes in the Effect Controls
Panel to animate them, which adds a little bit of movement without having to have an entire knowledge of a
new piece of software. Basically, what I
do for a lot of my little titles that I add
is just slide them down with a slide sound
effect to emphasize that movement and then slide them back out
of the frame again. It's just a JPEG or an
Illustrator file with a motion keyframe animation done in the effect
controls panel. Let's just have a look at that
real quick. We'll zoom in. If you look over here
in the motion portion of the Effect Controls panel, you can see that I've
put in a couple of keyframes here to
animate that slide. If we Zoom in, we can see that there's a
position keyframe here. I've just animated that. Then we've added little
slide sound effects. If I turn off all
of my audio here and just turn on
the sound effect. We'll just play this
through and see what it looks like
and sounds like. You can see it just slides down, [NOISE] comes into frame and then we cut right
to the second clip. Again, I'm not doing any
fancy animation here. This is a very simple
and effective way to add a little bit of a graphic element without having to have the
knowledge of After Effects, just we talked about, using presets or lots
for your videos. If you're not really
sure how to do any animations you're new to it. You just want to drag and drop and change the type scenario. Then you can buy these
little templates to use in your videos where
you can just change the font and change the type and customize
it to your videos. Now, other people
can also buy these, so you might see them show
up in other people's videos, but it's definitely an easy way to up your production
value in your videos. There's a couple of things you want to keep in mind when you're adding type or titles. The first thing is if you
are shooting for YouTube, you want to make sure
that your type is big enough that you can
read it on your phone. When we're editing
on a big screen, it's really easy to see a font
that's down in the corner. But if you watch that on your phone once it's
scaled-down really small, can you still read that type? Just ensure that
your type is large enough to be readable
at its smallest format. The second thing you want
to make sure of is that the fonts or
typefaces that you're picking out aren't
too thin that they start to disappear at a
smaller size as well. Then suddenly you
can't really read what's happening.
Be aware of that. Another thing you want
to keep in mind is the colors that you're choosing
for your type as well. There's certain colors
that just don't work together that are really
difficult to look at. Red text on black, for example, or black text on red is
very impossible to read. Makes your eyes go wiggly, same with yellow text on blue. If you're experimenting
with using different color
combinations and they might look good on
your big screen. Export a portion of
that and look at it on your phone and see if your eyes play any
weird tricks on you. Also, if you're using white
text on a background, just make sure that
you can read it. Oftentimes, using white text on footage can be difficult. Be aware of that if
you're also using white fonts over your footage. When you're on the hunt for
fonts to use in your video, you might be really tempted
to use a lot of them. There's so many fun ones. How can you choose? I want to
use this one and this one. If you aren't a graphic designer and aren't really
sure what fonts work together and how to make those fonts work
in a cohesive way. I definitely recommend picking no more than two fonts to use. Pick one font for your heading, one font for a subheading, and just use that
throughout your videos. When I'm building a mood board and picking fonts for my videos, I start to build
out a little bit of a style guide so I know
where to use what font when. For example, in our videos, we like to use location title. I have a little layout
done that says, this is the font you're going to use and the size
it's going to be, and this is where
it's going to be positioned in the video. Anytime that I have
a location title up, it's going to be
in the same spot, in the same font size, in the exact same font. It's consistent
through one video or through a series of videos. We're at a point now where we've talked about all of
it from start to finish, setting the tone all
the way through editing music and color
grading and now title. At this point, you
should be able to look at that old project and have a bit of a better idea on how we can improve that
and finish it off. Next up, we're
going to talk about honing your process and applying all the tools we talked about in this class beyond
just your video. [MUSIC]
9. Honing Your Process: Honing your process will take time and it's not going
to settle in right away. You have to put the time
and effort into it, but the more you make, the more you create, the easier all of
this stuff becomes, and the easier and quicker it will take for
you to fall into a format that you like and start developing that cohesive
look for your channel. I have been on this
journey to find my style ever since I
graduated from design school. I went from doing
self-branding in this very colorful color scheme to shooting all sorts of
different styles of photography, different lighting
schemes, just trying to figure out what was me? What was my brand? What
was my special look? Honestly, it took a number of years before I
started to feel comfortable in what that was
and it still ever evolving. Once you start to
get that format and you start practicing, now try creating a moodboard
or a brand board for your entire look
between your Instagram, your YouTube, your website, Twitter, products
if you have them, a blog if you have them, you want people to
start recognizing your work without seeing
your name or who posted it. This here is my pretty
rough brand board dump. Basically took all
of the elements for my branding and just
plopped it in here. With our channel we have a
couple of different lengths. We have our channel,
Becki and Chris. We have a series called the
focal length challenge. We have a photo
club called pixel lens visuals club on Facebook, we have product lines, we have downloadable
products on our website. When it comes to designing
all of these things, they should all have a
cohesive look and feel. This is like all of it here. We have our logo, focal length challenge logo. We have our secondary logo, which we use on
different things, and you can see that there's
a consistent feel here. We've used this same fonts
over and over again in different formats to
give a little bit of a different feel to certain
elements of our brand, but it all works together. Pixel & lens logo
down here is very similar to the focal
length challenge video, so that when somebody sees it, they recognize that as our work. We're using the same
fonts throughout too. You can see these
little thumbnails here are thumbnails
that we use for our log utility list that
we saw on our website and those match with the labels that we
made for our candles, which we were selling
a little while ago. These fonts also pull through on this custom tape that
we designed for boxes, for packaging when
we have products. Over here are some Instagram
story slides where we were advertising some of our new products that we have. Again, you're seeing
our logo repeated here. Everything has a cohesive
feel and as well, the color schemes
are very similar. A lot of neutral, black, white, gray, that's our
main color scheme. Then we introduce some
walnut here as well, which is not something that you would normally incorporate in brand colors but
because we do home decor, it's important for
us to bring some of those home decor elements
into our branding as well. We have a number of icons
that we use here as well. This little camera,
these little x's, these all play in part into our custom tissue paper that
we have for our products, for packaging stickers,
things like that. Then some of these
images here are just examples of what thumbnails could look
like for our channels. This is the look that
we've developed. Again, very black and white, devoid of color here, with just the skin tones being the only color
in the pictures. When you're working with
a brand or client on a project and you're not really sure what you should be doing, whether you should be doing
it in your [inaudible] or theirs, just be open. Communication is so important. Ask them what their
expectations are, what are they looking for, and also ask them why
they hired you as well. Did they hire you to create work that looks like your look, or did they hire you to create work that looks like their work? Once you put into practice
everything we talked about, it becomes much easier to
mold your style depending on who you're working with and what the client
is looking for. Also don't be afraid to collaborate with
other people too. If you're into video editing, but don't have much interest
in graphic designer, much knowledge there, you can hire a graphic designer to help you with your branding, or you could collaborate with a graphic designer and maybe they could create
some branding for you and you could create
a video for them. It's fun to work
with other people who have different skill sets. And it could definitely bring your videos
to the next level by delegating some of those
tasks to somebody else. I encourage you to
keep practicing, keep going through
this entire process, hone that process in, figure out what you like,
what you don't like. practice makes progress and
I'm super excited to see what you guys create after
watching this entire class.
10. Final Thoughts: Congrats, you made
it all the way through this entire class. I hope you feel
inspired and ready to rework that old project
with fresh eyes. Just a quick note
before you start, this project or even
your next project, to make sure that you have
a color calibrated monitor. You want to make sure
that if you're spending all this time developing
a mood board, picking color schemes, and then learning
how to color grade, that your color is
going to be accurate on your screen and then look
correct on other devices, on your phone, your TV, etc. We talked about a
lot of things today and you might find it a
little bit overwhelming, but don't forget that
practice makes progress. The more you implement all the tools we
talked about today, it will become easier
and you'll start to get a feel for
what your style is. Whether it's a full
finished project or even just a small
portion of your edits. I encourage you to
post your projects in the project gallery below and I look forward
to seeing them. Thank you so much for coming on this journey with
me and who knows, maybe one of these days I'll be able to spot your work just based on the way it looks from everything you've learned
in today's class. Thanks for watching and
we'll see you next time.
Becki Peckham, Video Editor, YouTuber
