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[ Read More to find out how I did the visual FX ]

Joe Lynch ended up shooting the music video, chopping it up and editing a fairly finished rough-cut by Tuesday or so of last week ( ~Dec. 16. ) He dropped off an external hard-drive, and I copied the rough cut Final Cut Pro QT locally onto my 2nd-Generation Macbook Pro with 3GB of RAM.

I brought it into After Effects CS3, and started going through each shot, seeing which light-sources I could attach lens flares to.

I decided to use Sapphire Plugins for the color-correction and lens flares. It turned out really great, they have an amazing hue/sat/bri plugin that allows you to adjust the brightness / contrast while still being to offset the darks lighter or brighter which allowed me to give it that ‘muted / white but high-contrast’ look that I was going for to parody the colors in Kanye’s Love Lockdown video.

There’s an, ‘Auto-Tracker’ Lens Flare Sapphire Plugin which dynamically adds lens flares to white-hot bright light-sources. It tends to ‘jitter’ around the frame a lot, so for the most part I animated and placed the lens flares by hand.

Since each shot has different white hot spots and brightness values, I went through each shot and set custom values for color-correction for each specific shot. It was fairly tedious, but I was really happy with the final outcome.

Below are Before & After shots of the music video to give you some reference on how the effects were added.

[ The 'Before' Shot  ]

[ The 'After' Shot  ]

It really goes to show you how easy it is to create a sharp-looking, high-budget / production values piece. I hope you enjoyed the quickie ‘behind the scenes.’

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