We recently filmed a music video for the amazing up and coming  duo Miss600. We were fortunate to have access to a rooftop location that overlooked Nottingham City centre and lucky that it didn’t rain, and as it was late afternoon the light was beautiful and not too harsh, but it was hard to get definition between exposing for the lead singer Hannah’s face and exposing for the sky. So we decided to add the clouds in post production. Here is a little tutorial on how to do this effectively.

1. First we did an offline edit and so new the exact shots that we were going to use for the roof scenes.

2. We then brought the shots into after effects

3. Next we looked through our stock library of moving sky and cloud images until we found the right one that suited the scene.

4. In after effects we placed the sky in the correct place and applied a multiply mode, so that it only affects the light areas.

5. We then used the masking tool to outline around Hannah and David on any areas where the sky was too obvious.

6. We then created numerous adjustment layers that were applied to either both the sky and the video footage or just the video footage that allowed us to grade the image so that it not only matched the sky but had a more film look to it.

Even though this was shot on true HD, even the smallest amount of post production digital grading and manipulation of the image can make a huge difference.

You can also use mapping to align the sky to a point in the video which will mean that it will move with any camera movement, but that is for a different day!