This post will focus on the arrangement of the film and how I cut my sequences in order to achieve its final look.

For the narrative, I jumped back and forth between the 2 shots constantly in order to give a more poetic look for the film. Silence played a big role in this short experiment. The absence of sound give it more of a dramatic visual effect, intensifying the fight. We don’t know what they’re arguing about, and is it really important that we know?

After reviewing my final export and bringing it to the class lecturer for feedback, I realized that the narrative of the story could be better structured and produce a clearer meaning to the film. Cutting on “sorry” when my actress was writing on the mirror made it seem like she was sorry for being the victim when my intentions were for her to say sorry for what she was about to do. This simple mistake in the narrative could mislead audiences who are watching the film, making it seem like she was the one at fault. This in results doesn’t make the character sympathetic, but instead cause confusion to the audiences.

My intentions for the film was to give audience’s their own interpretation of the film, questioning if she was going through with the suicide or not, while at the same time show her motives on why she would carry out such a thing.

Cut on action- this were the guidelines that I used for every cut I made in this editing. For every action that was happening in the fight, I cut another scene in order to show a clearer difference between both timelines. This in result create a quick form storytelling between both present and past.

All these concepts combined in to one experimental film resulted in to a film that I was surprised by.

Please take note of the time this blog is being posted, yes because this is exactly what time I’m awake and still doing my editing. Piece of advice for anyone who wants to do what I’m doing, drink more water, it helps reduce the hallucination.

The joy of every editor….Arranging sequences.

Jokes aside, let’s get to the serious topic. Continuing from what I did in production, I was pretty clear on what I wanted to achieve in post-production. Thanks to the planning in earlier stages, and the notes I took down in during production, I edited most of my footages with ease. I didn’t encounter much problems with editing as editing has always been a strong point in my filmmaking skills. The real struggle I had was deciding on the style that I wanted to go with. Yes I did decided to go on a more “whiplash” look in the earlier stages, but due to certain obstacles I faced, I had to tone down the look and create another different look. It is some what similar, but different at the same time.

To add on with the point I had in my earlier blog post, this picture serves as evidence for the limitations of using a DSLR for filming. It didn’t make the editing easier either due to the compressed video, I didn’t have much flexibility controlling my highlights and shadows, this in result caused limited the amount of grading I could do in my film. In the attached image above, the highlight is clearly blown out, probably 3 stops overexposed and I could really do much to save it. Luckily that frame only last a few seconds and is hardly noticeable. You really start to see the flaws in using a DSLR once you have experience editing, luckily for me I’ve took in to account most of these errors and worked my way around it. Part 2 will discuss more on how to color grade, and how I achieved my look.

This is a continuation from my previous blog.

The camera:

The camera is the probably one of the bigger reason why the images didn’t come out as the way they are in the movies. Since this is a large topic to cover, I’ll break it down to a few parts so it would be quicker to understand.

• Codec: The maximum format that the DSLR could run is 1080p All-I file, which is something similar to motion jpeg. It is very compressed and often doesn’t offer much flexibility in post production.
• Fps: The maximum frame rate that the camera could run is 25 fps in 1080p, which is pretty standard, but often time limits what the director wants to achieve. Not having the ability to shoot in slow motion forces me to rethink what could be replaced in order to seem like the picture is moving slow.
• Rolling shutter, moire and aliasing: This is probably the most frustrating part about using a DSLR as the main camera. Because the sensor was not built for full video compability, images often look disgusting in camera. The rolling shutter became an issue while filming the fight sequence as I couldn’t move my camera to aggressively or it will results in some really ugly images. Moire and aliasing meant that certain clothes could not be worn that day such as stripes or fun. If she had done so, the video would have looked very distracting and muddy.

The shoot:

The shoot overall went pretty smoothly, mainly because it was at a location that i was familiar with and because the weather was pretty good that day. I had the help of another camera operator because I knew in order to get the filming quick, it had to be shot on 2 separate cameras. It became clear that it was a good idea when I was filming the fighting scene. Being bale to worry about a single angle made it easier to operate.

On the next few blog posts I will be focusing on the production day, the problems we encountered and how we resolved it.

Since this was an experimental film and lighting wasn’t really the focus of the shoot, I didn’t have to worry too much about having the correct lighting and just to make sure that my subject and background were properly exposed. The real challenge that I face during the shooting day was time. Most of my crew members had to leave before 2 and that gave me about 4 hours of planning and shooting.

Timing:

Thankfully, thanks to my planning in pre-production, I was able to shoot scene after scene with ease. Although, with so much planning done, there would still be more unforeseen that would appear. One of it being that my actress could cry during the shoot, and that held the shoot back by a few minutes. We had to be creative and resolve this problem, so we looked to what I could find in  the kitchen. Lucky for us, I still had some leftover onions and I told my actress to chop it, which resulted in her tearing up. This simple method saved us a lot of time, and I should have been more prepared and bought eye droplets, but the turned out to be a decent enough solution.

Lens Choice:

Since we shot the film in the morning, the sunlight remained consistent throughout the shoot so exposure wasn’t too big of a concern. What I felt really did challenge me though was making my idea in to a reality. The images I had in mind were no where near what I achieve during the shoot, and after further research I realized it was my choice of lenses that led to this issue. Many of my sample images that were taken from movie were shot with anamorphic lenses, which was something I didn’t have because of its price. To make the best with what I could do, I shot most of my scenes with prime lenses (Sigma 35mm Art lens) to achieve the sharpest image possible.

For this blog post, I will focus on the structure and how I organized my film set.

Since I’ve already finished talking about my inspirations on the film in Part 1, I thought it would be great to look through my thinking process in this blog post.

Based on the image belows, you can clearly identify that I’ve arranged my shooting and story sequences in numbers. The whole reason behind this is because it allows me to easily change the shooting sequence as easily as I want to. I also find this method very flexible as when I decided to do a certain correction, I can just cross out the numbers, and write another story on another page replacing that number.

Besides easing me with the narrative, it also helps during the shoot, giving me the convenience to know which scene should be shot first and which scene I could save for later. The benefit with having this kind of flexibility enables me to save time and coordinate better with my crew.

For the next few blog posts, I’m going to break down my thought process when planning, shooting and editing this film.

In part 2 I will break down how I arranged and format my shoot, but for this blog I would like to explain my idea of the film and how I came to my final look.

To start us off, pre-production was probably the most annoying part for me because I’ve never really thought of myself to be a good writer and have always prefered to be behind the camera. The reason for this is because I don’t think that my ideas were good and often times I would be too ashamed to see the results of my own films. But for the purpose of this experiment, I decided to step out of my comfort zone and conquer my fears.

what I found challenging as a director is the idea I want my film to take on. My experimental idea was largely influenced by films such as “Memento” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”, therefore my story line were going to be based on that as well. Figuring out the appropriate type of cuts to bring my subject back in to the past was the key in to this whole experiment. I always found match cuts and transition through sound very interesting, but I also had to work with the limited gears I had. Since I didn’t have a proper audio recorder, I decided to go simple and just tell the story visually.

Besides telling the story, I also was trying to figure out the color tone of my film, how I wanted it to look and what would be the best way to show the character’s motive. So I looked to “Whiplash” as a source of inspiration for my color tone. I love the warm tones of the films and how it brought a very reflective contrast on the character. It not only feels intense, but a little bit uncomfortable to look at, which was the look I was going for.

This is a quick look of my inspiration for the films, more will be explained in Pt.2.

I have to admit, I was an hour late for class and totally missed out on the lessons about white balancing, so I did my own research and discovered how to do proper color correction in post production.

Jarle Leirpoll’s video was the first I looked to for post production editing. Having to edit the lastest movie “Deadpool”, I was blown away by how beautifully graded the film was. He divided color correction in to a few stages, which I did not know about until I saw his videos.

The first stage was to adjust the color balance of the film by identifying the whites and grey that could be spotted in the sequence. After identifying the neutral colors, he used the curves (which could be found in Premiere) to adjust the color in order to get the proper balance of the film. He then added an “S-curve” to increase the contrast and adding more details to the film.

Moving to the second stage, he then fixed the skin tone of the actor/actress in his films. Using the scope built in premiere pro, it acts as a guideline on getting the proper settings of the skin tone. After getting the skin tone corrected, he then proceeds to controlling his exposure and again guided by the reference monitor in premiere. If the object is moving, he using a track matte and mask in order to properly expose his subject.

All these steps are essential in getting the film look corrected. A lot of beginners filmmakers mistaken color correction for color grading and totally skip this step. I found a new importance in getting the color of the film right before grading it because it can ultimately affect the final product of the film.