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Final edits

 

#1. The trouble with multiple editors. After we’d finalised the story edit, it came time for me to start applying the b-roll to the film. This is where I encountered an issue. The b-roll the Zitni and Alice had so nicely cut up for me, was unusable. Somehow the file names had been changed, and thus none of the files in their sequence corresponded to any of those on my laptop, and hence I couldn’t include the b-roll they had cut up unless I went through and manually found each film clip for each piece of randomly named b-roll. This meant that I had to start cutting up the b-roll again, leaving little time to fine tune the b-roll placement before the fine cut showing, and this was evident. Although the basic elements of the b-roll I had included were good, some were cut too fast, I included too many shots in some places and not all were paced perfectly. So after screening, we went through and noted down the elements that needed to change and got to work.

 

#2. Soundscape, final edits & reflections. Bradley kindly took the project to make final pacing adjustments along with adding in soundscape elements and music. The soundscape elements were something I had not used regularly myself in films, yet they make all the difference and add an entire textural layer to the film, grounding it in reality. The soundscape elements that Bradley included worked very well in achieving this, and he worked well with the limited amount of materials we had gathered for the soundscape while shooting. Some of the elements were far too loud and had to be toned down during the fine edit, and the music still presented a problem, as it cut between loud abrasive country music, to techno/electronic music, intended to represent the country/city, but it just did not work and was very distracting to the piece, especially when placed over Elizabeth who’s sweet personality and slow pacing made this disjunct even more apparent. Something more ambient was needed, to keep the pace of the piece, becoming slightly louder only occasionally when needed. I took the piece of more electronic music Bradley had found, layered a few elements, and quietly laid it under the piece, bringing it up only a few times throughout. This seemed to work better, and was the best we could muster with the time left and the resources of free, archival music that were available to us.

 

It was then on to the final adjustments to the piece. After stabilising shots, matching colour between cameras, fixing exposure and contrast to a better medium, I started on a simple colour grade. I initially tried to keep with our initial idea of having two distinct aesthetic palettes – orange in the country, blue in the city – however in practice this did not work, the aesthetic palettes of the original shots were too similar and grading them differently essentially just made both washed out and wrong. In the end I opted to grade them together, and create a cohesive feel throughout the piece, relying on the age, location, job factors to separate them instead. I feel this worked and ultimately created a nice looking piece.

Some elements that even in the finished piece still need to be worked on include:

• Conforming different shutter speeds to look the same – this is especially evident in one particular shot wherein the taxi is driving out the frame, and it just looks wrong. This will bug me forever and I intend to find a way to fix it, as the methods I tried did not do a good enough job.
• Sound – I didn’t have time to do extra fine adjustments to the sound, so there is still noise that should be removed, and mixing that needs to occur to make the interview more cohesive and smooth, as some sections where dialogue begins are quite jarring and should have been gradated to avoid this.
• Finessed the stabilisation – there are some sections which a more toned down approach to stabilising would have worked, but where quick fixes didn’t. There are also some sections, while not super noticeable, have stabilising artefacts present in them, which could also be fixed by finessing the stabilisation tools.