Aetuts+ Weekend Workshop #3 – “Random Time Freeze”

We’ve recently started a new weekly community project where we’ll be posting a video created by one of our wonderful readers, then ask you all to offer constructive feedback on the work. It’s a great way to learn more about video, express your viewpoint, and have your own content critiqued! Submit your own videos at the bottom.

Quick Ground Rules

1. Play nice! We’ve deliberately chosen videos that aren’t perfect, so please be constructive with any criticism.
2. Feel free to offer any type of advice – movement, lighting, color, pacing, etc.
3. You can also link to videos that you feel offer a great example of this type of content done exceptionally well.

Without further ado, here is this week’s candidate for critique!

“Random Time Freeze”

Story Behind the Project

Actually there’s not that much of a behind this. I wanted to upload a video to Youtube… Came up with this idea… Called a few friends over to shoot some footage… And the next day the video was done.

Before making this video I was browsing the the internet for any ideas, and I saw the Advanced Time Freeze tutorial on Video Copilot. They do the broken car window effect there but with another technique. I had also seen this tutorial here on Aetuts+ which was pretty cool and I remembered an old commercial with clowns and cops where the time was frozen so I wanted to try out the time freeze effect myself.

To achieve the freeze effect, I told my friends to just stay still as when I walked pretty fast through the house filming.

When filming, I just used the original lights that were in my house, so I know the lighting in the video is terrible. To achieve the freeze effect, I told my friends to just stay still as when I walked pretty fast through the house filming. Doing this would allow me to slow down the footage later and any movements of my friends would be less noticeable. For the glass, smoke, flames, blood, puke and some other small stuff I matchmoved the footage so I could place it in the video. For the “flaming fart” I let my friend hold a light bulb where the flames would be, so I got all the light from the lamp shining up on their faces and in the scene. Interestingly, some of the frozen stuff in the video wasn’t create in post… like the playing cards on the table and the beer can in the dudes face. It was actually made with tape, toothpicks and other stuff to hold it in place.

I know there is a lot of fighting in the video and it wasn’t planned that way. For every new take, people changed places and did different things. By the time I finally got a shot where everyone was completely still, it turns out that it was a shot with everybody fighting.

Hope you like the video! I know there is so much to improve upon and that’s why I wanted to have my video featured on a Weekend Workshop here on the site so I could get advice from you guys.

Please let us know what you think in the comments – how would you have approached this project or done things differently?