Construction - How The Black Bars Were Made (Jessica)

Before we started to gather together our footage we had to start getting the basics down first. So when we started to construct our video we started with the black bars, our base for the entire video.

In order to make our music video look more professional, as well as give it a cinematic look; we decided to add black borders. The black borders we made simply in Adobe Photoshop. 

Firstly I opened up Adobe Photoshop and name our PSD file as Black Border (easy, simple name). I then set the width to 800 pixels and height 1200 pixels. Making my PSD this size means that rather than trying to find the exact measurements of the borders; it would be easily to use the crop tool and alter the size as much as I would want. 

Once I have set all the necessary details I clicked on the ok button and proceed onwards. As you can on the right all the preferences I set gave me a vertical rectangle white box. Next I needed to change the colour of the rectangle box to black before I can alter the size of the PSD. To do this I simply used the bucket tool selected the colour I wanted which was black then clicked on the rectangle box and it changed to black. 

Next (using the crop tool) alter the size of the PSD. Using the crop tool I change the vertical rectangle to a horizontal rectangle - by making the rectangle horizontal it would fit much easier into our music video. As you can see on the picture on the right I stretched the crop tool across the rectangle box until it touched both ends and then pressed the enter button; now it looks like this:

After I had made it the size I wanted it to be, I then used the select tool and made it wide enough to make sure that on either size there is an equal amount of black left out. I made sure the amount of black that I left out was too skinny, in order for me to be able to play around with the size in Final Cut. Next using the CMD + X ( command and X keys) I cut out the selected part of the rectangle which gave me a white background.

Finally I have made the black borders which will give our  music video the professional, cinematic group. When I was finally satisfied with the look of the black borders, I went to file - save as.

I made sure that I saved the black border in a easily place for me to locate later in Final Cut, I also saved the PSD file as a PNG; this ensure that the white part of the rectangle will not appear on the video,