CCTV Video Feed Construction - Luke/James

A major part of our music video is the scene filmed in the CCTV office. You will notice the effect which is projected onto the large screen in front of the masked men. This needed to be completely constructed from scratch as it needed to feature our actor.

The first step was to film the shots, this was our on second day of filming. I did this from the stereotypical  places you would expect CCTV cameras to be positioned. The next step was to make the overlay which would give it the CCTV effect. The only program which would give us a good enough effect was adobe after effects, specifically CS4. Below gives you an in depth look as to how we made it on this software.

The first thing we did was set a 30 second loop as to ensure the video would not continue on and therefore become out of sync, we obviously did this for all 4 separate screens as to ensure that when the video was looped, a single feed would not interrupt the events which are occurring in another.

The second change was to add the black and white overlay which is a staple of CCTV feeds. This was simply done by saturating the video clip. Above you can see the settings we selected for making the flicker which gives the CCTV feed a realistic look, as if it is feeding through live, something we wanted to portray. We selected a cloud overlay and then stretched the layer, as seen in scale. We also reduce the opacity as to not cover the entire video with this effect and set it to rumble, to look like interference.

After doing this we wanted to insert timecodes into all the clips. These were seen in our CCTV research and as well as being common place on all CCTV cameras, look really effective and slick! We set all the settings and added the black box and white text and moved it into the bottom corner.

It was much the same process when making the camera name banners. We set 4 boxes with the camera names in it (Cam1-4) and set white text in a black box. We anchored this to the top corners of the feeds and this only helped the realism of the CCTV feeds.

The final and clever idea we had was to elongate the clips when Dan is in another frame…..ok basically I mean that when he moves from one frame to the other, with the original on loop, it would look like he was in 2 places at once. To solve this I cut the end section off of the original clip and looped it to look like it was live but in fact wasn’t, a clever idea to stop this problem, this can be seen above.

And above you can see our final effect on a sample clip. This allowed us to produce the 4 feed effect by merging all 4 of the finished edited feeds together. The final effect can be seen below.