I thought this might be a good opportunity to address some of the worries I had going into editing about the way we conducted our shoot.

The main concerns being the:
– quality of the footage with the camera that we were using (focus)
– The quality of the audio
– Being able to easily navigate to audio whilst editing

The footage came out really well! for the most part the footage was definitely usable, there were clips that were soft or completely out of focus but we took enough takes for there to be at least one usable/workable shot. There are certain instances where the focusing couldn’t be helped because it was such a shallow depth of field, like in the image below, only half of “Ted” and “Vincent’s” face is in focus.

 

 

The audio was a big problem! It turns out that the lapel microphones were very faulty and wouldn’t record anything! so there are a few files of nothing mixed in with the rest; the only usable audio came from the boom. Luckily they were all grouped so one take was in one folder which had 4 audio tracks in them. This did make it marginally easier to sort through the audio tracks however it was still a hassle opening up the audio tracks to listen for the markers instead of being able to just read it on the still image of the footage. Alas we didn’t do that, next time I will try and be more adamant that we need to add the audio roll to the marker!

This isn’t the end of the world though and we seem to be coping well enough so I shall continue to soldier on.

So we decided as a group to go the way we’ve alway gone when dividing up tasks and that was for every body to take responsibility for their own genre. As has been noted several times before, I don’t have a genre that I’m looking after so it made sense that I was to cut together a trailer to show off the series as a whole. Originally I thought it would be better to wait for everyone else to finish their editing, that way I could use their already edited footage, keeping the correct colour and the correct mood for the genre. Very quickly I realised that this would leave me at a big disadvantage as I was totally dependant on everyone else finishing theirs and giving me enough time. So I decided to create a trailer from scratch.

We had gotten a class on how to set out your editing and workspace so I tried to keep to that as much as possible. It seemed like a lot of ground work for some peace of mind but I can understand the reasoning behind it. We were to create new sequence every time we wanted to do something different, that way we would have a record of where we came from. I have to admit it is hard to keep it in your mind, its a bit like clicking the save button, you never can remember it until its too late.

My first step isn’t very exciting so it’s not worth much of a post but here it is anyway. I set up a sequence entitled trailer footage which was all the unedited shots I though were good enough to make it into the trailer. I ended up with about 20 minutes of footage which was a lot better than the hour and a half that we had. I chose these shots because they looked good, not because they were important to the story. There is, however, one piece of dialogue I will keep which was filmed on the second day which is the character Jack explaining to camera why they are here, basically telling the plot points of the series. My plan, as it stands at the moment is use that dialogue under the other images to create an exciting and insightful trailer.

You can see my first attempts at editing a trailer below:

 

So we have finished out filming and it looks really good, really proud of the shots and everyone involved! in our consult we were asked to do a colour correction exercise to start us off. Even though I do love editing, I use Final Cut Pro instead of the program that we were asked to use which is Premiere Pro. Although they’re similar the small differences have been enough to trip me up and is just more time consuming.  Although the tools are different I figured the outcome should be the same so with that in mind and my past experience I set to work on colour correcting the clip that I chose. I didn’t choose the clip for any other reason than I liked it.

In the video you’ll see 4 clips each with different colouring, I tried not to be too gentle with the colour so that you could really see the difference and it would be easier what kind of mood a certain colour gives to the shot.

The first clip is is the footage that has come straight out of the DSLR – no colour correction.
(because its a DSLR the image is already compressed which means it looks good from the start but its difficult to edit the image because there isn’t as much information and range – worth noting when watching the clips)

The second clip I was going for a darker horror vibe, even though the dialogue doesn’t suit the genre I think with this colouring and the appropriate music this shot could come out very sinister!

The third clip is green, because I wanted to try something different, however upon looking at this shot I can see why not many films use green as their filter because it looks pretty awful. I can see how you might use it to your advantage, if a character was meant to be looking or feeling sick.

The final clip is almost a sepia looking filter, the cliche would be an old western but I feel that the fairly flat colouring could lend itself well to the noir genre that we’re exploring as it would let the shadows stand out more than the original footage would.

 

 

So the time had finally come to shoot this thing, and I couldn’t be happier! Even though it was interesting to work on the pre-production and it was a real learning experience for me, the practical side is where I hit my stride and where I was finally able to give some back to the group. The creative writers in our group made it clear that they weren’t the most comfortable behind a camera or doing anything technical so the other media students and I made sure they knew what they were doing by the end of the day.

As you might have seen in the call sheet that I had put together we all took it in turn of being various things, depending on the number of crew we had at a time we would have a Director, AD, cinematographer, boom operator and light operator. By the end of the shoot we all had done at least one of each. I think this was the best way to do it because it allowed everyone to have a taste for each individual job and also allowed us media students to lead by example.

In regards to the actual shooting I think it went fairly well! we had a slight problem with an actor not showing up which we managed to overcome by having one of our own step in but besides that there were no major problems. I mentioned in a previous post that it would be interesting to see how I would go running with a call sheet instead of running on the fly: to be honest, I didn’t find it much of a help. It was good in the sense that we didn’t leave anything out because we new exactly what we needed to film and it made sure that we each gave everyone an equal turn which is fair in this context but when it comes to actually being in the industry you don’t swap around your jobs every hour. I guess it might have been the way that I wrote out the call sheet, I tended to block out hour lots where we could rehearse and film a specific genre but besides stating that every other decision was thought up right there and then, which is how I usually work. I feel, if I had the opportunity again, I would take one script and put it through the whole pre-production phase, doing things like making a shot list and drawing up a story board to create something very rigid that you have to stick to. unfortunately this was not the case and I never got that epiphany that I was hoping for, something to prove to me that it was worth doing so much planning. I guess the only thing that I found benefit in is organising the crew and cast to shoot around their other schedules of work and life, although you’d like to think that if they were in the industry and getting paid for it then you wouldn’t need to worry about that anyway.

Anyway, all in all it was a great day of shooting, I managed to bring some skills to the team which I may have been lacking in the pre-production stage, nifty tricks that I had learned from my other shoots, only things that you can really learn once you’ve been through them before, like using a swivel chair for a dolly shot.