Project Breakdown

I wanted to split the aftermovie into different sections – general pictures & videos, STMPD RCRDS pop-up store, STMPD RCRDS Label Night and finally Martin Garrix’s show at RAI Amsterdam. I started out by making polaroids within Adobe Photoshop of many of the pictures that were taken during the week. I then brought them into Premiere Pro where I animated them along with a nice background texture. This was accompanied by one of Martin Garrix’s songs (Real Love), and I made sure to time the animations to the music to give more emphasis on what was being seen on screen.

After this, I started on the next section – the STMPD RCRDS pop-up store. This was generally the place to meet for Garrix fans during ADE, so I wanted to make a section specifically for this. I used a different style of song for this (Justin Mylo – Written In The Sky), and continued the same polaroid theme but with pictures specifically from inside the store. Again, I made sure to time the animations to the music. This section also included the use of some videos inside the store, which were sent to me by different members of the chat.

For the STMPD RCRDS Label Night, the first show out of three that I attended, I wanted to have two mini-sections. One for Martin Garrix himself (the headliner), and one for the other artists performing. I used two very heavy and aggressive sounding songs to match the energy of the videos that were being shown throughout this section. The videos in question were sent to me by various members of the chat. However, most of them were portrait videos and I was making a landscape video. To combat this issue, I decided to put three videos side to side to fill the space, with the best/most important video in the middle where the viewer’s eyes are most likely looking at. I made sure to sync each cut with a beat in the songs. The videos that I included along with the music made for an excellent pairing.

The final section was by far the biggest. Martin Garrix performed two nights in a row at a large convention centre called RAI. This show was considered to be one of the biggest shows of the year where he performed for 3 hours on the first night (18+), and 2.5 hours on the second (All Ages). My vision for this section was to use several songs and combine footage from both shows. I gathered as many videos as I could from both myself and members of the group chat – I also downloaded the 3 hour long YouTube video of the show posted to Martin’s official channel. My plan was to utilise all of this to create one big insight into the epicness of the show.

The first song I started with was Martin’s intro for the show (Carry You). I wanted to sync all the videos I had with specific shots from the YouTube video. This was by no means an easy task. It took a while, but I eventually did it. But then I had to go through each video and decide how much of each video I wanted to include and where. The only way I could do this was by trial and error. After several different versions, I had something that I was happy with. One technique I learnt about was creating a symmetrical look with the 3 portrait videos. For this, I would take two videos that were taken from similar angles and put them to the left and right, and then have the video in the middle to be at a completely different angle, to give it a nice, neat, symmetrical look. I wanted the next song I chose to be a bit more aggressive sounding (Glitch). However, for this, I didn’t want to sync videos to the whole part of the song I was including, only the first part of the drop. Instead until the drop hits, most of the footage is taken from different times during the show. I did this in order to give the aftermovie a bit more variety in terms of the specific shots as well as the visuals & show production seen. I used this same technique for the second half of the drop.

For the next song (Breakaway), I went back to syncing videos for the whole part of the song I was using. I felt like I had to do this as within the Garrix community, the visuals and show production during this song is iconic. This again took me a while to get right as I had to sync a lot of videos, but eventually I finished it. The next song (Biochemical) is also very production and visual heavy, so I again decided to sync all the videos I had. This resulted in this part of the aftermovie having so much energy. The next two songs (Reboot & Forever) I went back to using footage from different parts of the show and only syncing videos during the first part of the drop. For the final song (Starlight), I felt I had to go big, and include lots of videos and sync everything together, exactly like I’d done for the first song. This meant taking on the task once again of syncing many different videos with the YouTube video, and then choosing which video goes where. This did take a long time but eventually I made something that felt so euphoric to watch, which I was very happy with. After the final song, I wanted to include some credits. This would include song names and most notably credits to the people who provided footage. I also made sure to accompany all this text with some polaroids on the left hand side to make it less boring.

The final thing for me to do was to polish some parts that I wasn’t 100% happy with, do some colour grading, and finally export it. I posted the video to YouTube shortly after, where it was recieved incredibly well by people both in and out of the ADE Chat.