There isn’t much to say that hasn’t been said in my previous post about collaboration but in a nutshell here it is. As a group we made sure that everything was decided evenly. We tended to work in stages and everyone had a job for that stage, even if they weren’t the same job, classic example: everyone else was writing scripts, whilst I was editing scripts; everyone was buys sourcing talent, whilst I was organising and writing up a call sheet. There were definitely times where people strengths and weaknesses showed, like in any other situation. The creative writers were in their element when writing the scripts and the media students generally took the back seat to learn. Then when it came to the production side of things the media students were in their element and the creative writers took the back seat to learn.

If you’ve ever heard of the phrase too many cooks you understand thins paragraph. There were sometimes I felt there was too much input from people; for instance, it took us a long time to decide on our initial idea because everyone was so keen to throw in their ideas that it was hard to move on from. Other clashes we had were just small things, people preferring to do it a certain way, whether it was the movement of the camera or the way that the scripts were written up. But if the only problems that we had was that everyone wanted to contribute too much then I think we did pretty well as a team.

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, one of the valuable lessons I’m learning is that, in order to make things run smoother and more efficiently, sometimes you have to learn to bite your tongue and get on with the task at hand, otherwise you’ll be going around in circles all day discussing what slogan a character should have on their T-shirt.

I have to say, the same thing goes for participation, we all understood that we had separate lives to live, work was a major thing we had to work around but we all did extremely well to make it to meetings and the shoots when we could. After our consult on Monday we had our own separate meeting, which everyone attended as much as they could. We had full days of shooting and editing that people gave up their weekends for. There is no stand out from this group, because we were all on the same page as to what we needed to get done. I’d like to commend my teammates: Niamh, Trent, Darcy, Nat and Jen for an excellent effort and a great result.

With the second Trailer I tried to make it more informative without having the rely on my narrating the whole thing. I used the footage and audio that was taken on the second day of shooting from Jack, who was the lead on the mockumentary genre. Cutting together her dialogue with titles helped explain the story a bit more. The main problem I have with this is it makes Jack seem like the main character of the series when in reality each character is the main character in their respective episodes. However I don’t know how I could’ve used dialogue from other character without making it sound too incoherent and messy.

One problem I had with the editing was trying to make the two different cameras that we used look similar enough. We decided to change camera for a number of stylistic reasons which made sense at the time however without the context it looks sloppy. Because the cuts are fairly quick I’m hoping that it mostly goes unnoticed.

explanation Trailer:

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.