Disneyland Globe

Recently I was charmed by a friends’ Disneyland 50th Anniversary snow-globe. I shot a snippet of video of the tiny glass sphere on my phone, and later at home was inspired to further edit the video – maybe add a different background and a more appealing audio track.

The original video looked like this:

The edited video:

First, from Adobe Bridge (or, Lightroom), I dragged and dropped the .mov file into Photoshop, creating a new Photoshop document. I selected all of the video layer (by either clicking the video layer in the Timeline panel and typing ‘command+a’, or, by command-clicking the video’s icon in the Layer panel), then went to Edit > Copy Merged. Next, I typed ‘Command + v’, and created a new (raster) layer, but it needed dragging above (and, outside of) the video group.

With the still image safely apart from the video group, the masking began – all the masking technique details, omitted here. (A later post, perhaps.)

I resized the canvas to a landscape orientation, to dimensions more Youtuby than the original phone video. I also needed a new surface on which to place the globe, so I dug up an old snapshot of Dewy Point, and masked out the background clouds.

Below the rocks layer, I placed a video of turbulent clouds, and we have:

With a bit of shadow effect and some Photo and Exposure Filters added, I choose File > Export > Render Video, fiddle with the setting, and I’m ready to take the resulting .mp4 file into Premiere Pro.

In Premiere Pro, I import my assets, being: the Disney Globe .mp4, and two audio tracks (organ track and rain/thunder track).

Really all that remains is to add Adjustment Layers for Spotlight Effect, Lightning Effect, and Strobe Effect. The speed of the video is obviously reduced, and I  trimmed the audio to fit where it was needed, and added some Audio Effects (Fade and Volume) – all done in Premiere Pro. (For more fine tuned audio editing, I typically edit in Audition and output a single audio file.)

In addition to my own stills and footage, the following sources were used in this project:

“Background Cloud Footage” – by Ryan Mast, https://archive.org/details/TI_Lancaster_Clouds_20060514

“Organ Etude” – by Muhmood, http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Muhmood/Tamara_and_Demon/07_muhmood_-_organ_etude

“Rain and Thunder Field Recording” – by Carl Lierman,
https://archive.org/details/RainAndThunderFieldRecording

Big high-fives to the Free Music Archive and the Internet Archive.
The Internet Archive, because, as George Santayana wrote “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”