Making the Hologram

 The Idea

Initial idea: This idea came to me whilst watching the documentary "The Great Hack" and "Social Dilemma". Both these documentary used sensational visual effects to elevate their scenes and aim to impact the audience. This is why I wanted to include an unrealistic and futuristic effect, thus came the idea for a holographic screen.

Software:For this effect I chose  Premiere Pro and iMovie to create this effect. The program iMovies was used just for the assembly of a small video to work as a plot device for the narrative of the story. Premiere Pro was the main tool for this project, so it would only be natural that I used it for my effect. I started by importing the video from iMovie into Premiere and drag and dropped it above my footage. Now we are ready for editing!

The Looks

It was important to make the hologram look realistic and like something from the future, so I went into the effects panel and searched for the RGB colour balance effect. This effect allowed me to change the combination of red green and blue in the video so that it would look like a hologram. I decreased Red to 0,Green to 152 and blue 195.

After that I selected the wave warp effect and dragged it into my footage. I selected the wave type to smooth noise, direction to 0 and speed to 5,0. Then came the Alpha Glow effect to add some glowing effects into the mix. I wanted my footage to be a little bright on the edges to add some realism into the footage.

I changed the colour of the glow to dark blue, just to match it with the whole holographic style.

The final touch was the opacity which I decreased, just to match the idea and let the effect blend with the environment around it.

Position and animation

When it comes to animation and editing movement I always work with keyframes. But first I need to make sure that, while I cut the footage to move it around, the sound of the clip would not be disturbed. This is why I pressed shift and clicked all the sound clips from the holographic footage and created a nest with the name "Holographic sound".  For the program to allow me to do that, I first needed to unlink the footage from the sound, by selecting "Unlink" in the right click menu.

Then I selected the clip where I wanted the screen to pop up and went to the start and scaled it down to zero. This way the program will automatically use the keyframes I chose to animate it with mathematic precision. 

Small Details

The volume needed to decrease or be muted in certain clips, so I used the audio gain option from the right click menu to lower the volume.

Reflection: It is always nice to work with new things and cannot wait for my project to finish and upload the full project.