Upcoming video preview: Finished Effect (Patreon)

This looks simple, but nothing ever is. The main problem here is audio -- in the original scene, the close-up of the photo goes on nearly three times longer, because Doc actually uses his finger to point at the fact Marty's brother is disappearing and they both comment on it.

A lot of their comments don't make sense in the context of what the edited photo shows, and muting them entirely makes it awkward when we sit on a close-up of a photo for so long with nobody saying anything. So that means shortening up the shot to read correctly for the flow of the scene.

Doing that wrecks the music. So how do we deal with that? At first, I thought maybe I could just drop the volume out and bring it back up only when people are speaking. That worked, but only to an extent. Doc's final line has these chimes behind it that made it sound strange.

Thankfully, Audacity's "Remove Vocals" plugin also has an "Isolate Vocals" mode. It took a bit of tweaking, but I finally got it to a place where it sounded passable. You can still hear the original background music if you REALLY strain, but once I went through and added fresh versions of the movie score, it covers it up and you only really hear the voices. 

Going back to the close-up of the photograph, something about it didn't look right. It needed to move. People never hold perfectly still, especially if their hands are out. Since the hands and the background were separate layers, I just ran a camera shake script on the hands, but dialed down the amount of shaking, so that it looks human. I also pulled in slowly on the photo a little bit, just to give it even more subtle motion. Then I added some film grain, because without it, it looked a little too digital. It's not perfect, but for a zero-budget quick gag in a 25 minute video, it's good enough. 

Hopefully the rest of the video will be done before 2020.