Slomo Effect by Jay Rock & Kendrick Lamar (Premiere Pro)

Published on November 23, 2018

Premiere Pro Tutorials

Kendrick Lamar, Masking, Motion control, premiere pro, Slowmotion

It’s time again for your favorite day of the week, the day weekend starts. No, I’m just kidding! It’s Copy Cat Friday, the day where we recreate effects from movies or music videos. And today we are looking at an effect from one of our favorite hip hop artists, Kendrick Lamar. He recently did a music video with Jay Rock, named WOW Freestyle. In this video you can see some different effects, but the one that caught our eye was the slowmotion effect. You can see Kendrick and Jay standing next to each other rapping and dancing. Nothing special, except that they move in slow motion alternately.

Now this effect can be very easy if you mount your camera on a tripod. Then it’s just a matter of synchronizing your movements between the two persons and masking them out in their shots. The synchronizing is a very important aspect for this effect. Because if one rapper is saying his lines, then the other one is in slow motion doing his thing. But you need to remember that this slow motion part is much faster in real life. So you can best time how long you want to rap or sing and then divide that with how much you want to slow it down. So for example if you sing for 10 seconds and want to slow it down 5 times, your slowed down actor needs to dance for 2 seconds.

I hope this makes some sense, because the synchronization needs to be spot on to make this effect work. Of course they take it to the next level with their motion. They do this with a motion controlled robot arm, which they often use in movies or music videos. This robot arm can be programmed with keyframes and thus can repeat it’s movements over and over again. And this is necessary so you can match the two shots perfectly and won’t notice you masked it together. Unfortunately this robot arm is super expensive and not really for sale for the consumers. You can always try to fake it with a jib like we did in previous Kendrick Lamar video. But this is still not the same and doesn’t have the same effect abilities as the real deal.

StoryBlocks Video

This video was supported by Storyblocks Video, an easy to use site full of stock footage, After Effects templates, backgrounds, motion Graphics and much more.