Project Breakdown

The trip to Budapest for Sziget festival was huge for both me & the rest of the ADE Chat who attended. We got up to so many different things so I wanted to make a long aftermovie, in the style of my ADE 2023 aftermovie. I wanted to cut it into segments again – polaroids & videos outside of the shows, Martin’s mainstage show, and Martin’s STMPD stage show. I started off by making polaroids in Adobe Photoshop, then making an animation for them inside Premiere Pro, like I did for my ADE aftermovie. For this segment, I wanted to choose a radio song that Martin had done (Smile) rather than an energetic one. Something different however, is that I used the full song instead of half the song. The first half was general pictures & videos, the second half was of Sziget festival itself and all the pictures & videos taken before Martin’s show.

The next segment was of the ADE Chat just before Martin came on stage, which made an excellent transition from the polaroid segment. During the Sziget livestream, some members of the group chat got interviewed by the host, so I felt like it was a nice touch to include this part, even if it was trimmed a bit. I then faded the video to black, and the intro song started (Empty), along with footage of the show during that moment. For this, I wanted to do what I did for my ADE aftermovie and sync lots of different videos of Empty, as well as the official YouTube video. I also used the same symmetry technique for when there are 3 portrait videos side by side. The syncing was a lot easier and quicker as I had done it before, plus there wasn’t as many videos to sync as last time. So then, I was able to move onto the next song.

For the next couple of songs (Breach & Julian Jordan – Never Stoppin’), I wanted to use some synced videos of each songs, but also wanted most of the videos to be of other parts of the show to add some variety to the video. I made sure to use footage that showed lots of lasers & lights in order to portray to energy. The next song (Robbie Mendez – Need You), was also played by Martin during the show. However, things didn’t go exactly to plan, as the DJ equipment lost power during the drop, and halted the show for 10-20 minutes. For the fans who look back on the show, this was a funny moment so I wanted to include it. But I also knew that including this would risk the energy portrayed in the video being lost. So I made sure to cut this part as much as I could so it only lasts about 10 seconds.

For the next two songs (Gravity & an unreleased collaboration with Afrojack), I synced videos from the entire part of the song played. This was especially tough as for both songs, I did not have much footage from people from the group chat. So there was a lot of trial and error that went into it. I did run into a couple of issues but I did manage to do it. I wanted the final song for this section to be very emotional and euphoric, so I went with one of Martin’s most popular songs High On Life. For this, I used footage from other parts of the show, then during the chorus onwards, I used different synced videos of just High On Life. I used lots of videos of people from the group chat within this part, as well as different shots of the show from the YouTube video. Additionally, I was able to manipulate the audio and video to make it seem like that was Martin’s last song of the show, when it wasn’t – Starlight was. This was because I had already edited a Starlight outro for the ADE aftermovie and wanted to end this one differently. After Martin says his thank yous and goodbyes to the crowd, the screen fades to black.

After this, text reading “a few hours later” pops up, and then a video showing Martin coming onto another stage fades in. This is the start of the final segment – Martin’s 2nd show of the night on a different stage. I decided to use a few songs to showcase this part (Poison, Byte, Wherever You Are & Carry You). For the first two, I primarily used random footage I could find of that show, and didn’t really do much syncing. However, once it got to Wherever You Are, and fellow DJ & Producer DubVision came on stage, I decided to sync videos I had of that song together. For the final song (Carry You), I also decided to sync the videos. As this was the final song, I wanted this to have as many different shots as possible. After going through this process I had pretty much finished the aftermovie. I then decided to make some credits again, crediting the songs and the people who provided footage, and once again accompanied it by having polaroids on the left hand side.

I then went back and added some final touches. This included altering some of the audio. During Martin’s shows, he will say things and shout into the microphone during a song (e.g. “1, 2, 3, let’s go” just before a drop). I was able to take this audio (which had music in the background) and uploaded them to a vocal remover/isolater website (https://vocalremover.org/). It uses AI to separate vocals from instrumentals in songs, so I utilised this tool for my aftermovie. After some playing around, all of the audio of Martin speaking sounded a lot cleaner. Once I finished this and some additional tweaks, I uploaded it to YouTube where it recieved lots of positive feedback.