Matt Duong Thoughts and other things.

So having finished my project brief 3 after what felt like the longest time sitting down over several days, going through videos and sounds, I have learned a few valuable things for later down the line.

For one, as I use Premiere more and more I feel more confident in using it. I feel I can edit at ease, and I only have to ‘search’ for things rather than learn how to use them. Another thing is that ploughing through all the footage I had gives me an insight to what it is like long term in terms of editing a film, documentary or anything along those lines. The grind to go through each shot, was one very long and drawn out process however it wasn’t at all boring by any means, it in a way excited me as I would be doing this a lot more further down the line.

One thing I did learn to use was the use of ‘morph cut’ which morphs two shots, being similar is a requirement, and transitions them by morphing them. Rather than just a straight switch between the two, it morphs the end and start points to make it look like it flows on from the previous shot. Something I learned while watching the Lynda.com tutorial and I thought it would be a good idea to use it in this. With this however I ran into a few difficulties with my video. A few parts of the video would have frame drops and I had no idea why it would be happening, but it had to do with my ‘morph cut’ effect and I had to keep rendering the entire video and sections of the video so it would run smoothly which it did in the end.

I had to do a second shoot as with my first shoot I got most of the interview shot, however I did not have a lot of ‘slice of life’ shots which I wanted after I did my initial edit. I feel like this is common practice for a second shoot to happen, because people tend to not get everything in the first shot.

Also in terms of ‘found footage’ is used, it took me quite a long time to decide what to use. I had a few things that were abstract to the topic of the video but it was difficult to find footage for something like that. So I decided to go with the slice of life idea, which during my editing I decided to go with it and found the right soundtrack to go with this slice of life idea and overall I am happy with the product. It was also great receiving positive feedback from my peers and my interviewee upon showing them the video before officially submitting it.

This interview in which Tina De Leon talks about her life at home with her family. She talks about her dog Archie and her husband Ben De Leon having being married for 3 years and gives a light hearted take on life.

Project Brief 3 – “Tina De Leon: An Interview” from Matthew Duong on Vimeo.

So over the past few days, I had to go back to record more footage and shots for my project brief. I feel that at my first shoot I had a lot of usable material in terms of an ‘interview’ but I didn’t actually shoot a lot of usable ‘slice of life’ shots which I could use. I did have some that I used from the first shoot but I didn’t have an intro or outro or anything that had a bit of ‘randomness’ to it. So I just shot a lot of random stuff, I told my interviewee to just do random stuff.

As I was editing the tone of my video was lighthearted, just talking about the good things in life sort of thing. So I figured I needed a light hearted, soft soundtrack. Which I found after about an hour of ploughing through youtube commons. The video itself felt very raw and closer to home I feel, as it showed just everyday things and reflecting on what everyday things makes us happy. So I tried my best to find the best soundtrack for this feeling and edited in such a way.

Some parts I wasn’t proud of when I was first editing today, some transitions were awkward, the music wasn’t flowing etc. So I decided to ‘bunch up’ the footage a bit more so it flows on a bit more according to the music, and it did flow a lot better than it did before.

Then I played around with the titles and transition effects for them, I had a play around, adjusting the time for the transition effect and found the right time for the effects corresponding to the video.

I looked at the middle of video and I felt something was missing, like the interview was playing but there wasn’t much happening on the screen, it was the ‘split personality’ part. Which I couldn’t really find any found footage corresponding to a split personality, so I looked up on wikimedia commons transparent smiley and sad faces and just tried to use them at an attempt at humour.

Then it came to he ending, I decided to go with a soundclip I recorded which gives an overall touch to the video, like the cherry on top and combined it with random footage I shot along with some found footage in an attempt at humour.

Overall, I am pretty happy with the product, a few things I’m not too fond of, but it’s all bout the experience. I think overall out of any project I have spent the most time doing this, which is good; the more I do things the more I get used to it.

So still editing my video, when I played it fully there was a section that had a frame drop. As previous I did a process of elimination to find the source of the problem. So nothing worked so I guess it was the video encoding again. However this wasn’t the case. It just dropped its frames every time the section played. So I learned something when I was using the effect ‘Morph cut’ which I use to morph two bits of video together for a more natural transition, to do this well though I have to mark an in and out point where the effect is and render this in-out section. So I did this to the section that had a frame drop and it fixed the problem.

So doing some editing and rewatching parts of my video to see if it fits the style I’m going with, I encountered a small problem with editing in premiere. I realised that a certain section of my video was dropping frames per second for some reason. The video I attached on to the interview wasn’t playing smoothly at all, however to rectify this I went through an elimination process, opening up task manager and played the video. From this I determined it wasn’t my laptop that was the problem with this frame drop. So it had to be the video or encoding of the video I downloaded. So I re-downloaded it, and edited it back and it made it smoother. I could’ve just selected another video but I’m just documenting the process I went through.

Having progressed mostly through the week, working 3 hard days after filming I got the skeleton of my interview done. After some tinkering with the sequences of things being said I ended up with a timeline that looks like this

There were a lot of clips I did not use because it didn’t quite fit the happier theme that this video had throughout. I mainly had animal found footage to accompany with the video as my interviewee was talking about her dog for most of the video and I had a human baby shot for a while but decided to scrap it because I felt it didn’t fit.

Over the last couple of days I’ve been tinkering with transition effects and the overlaying video that accompanies the interview, putting it in different sequences to what they were originally and I’ll say I’m happy so far about the clips I have.

Of course the next step is to put in more clips, find a fitting backing track to go with this interview and to shoot some extra bits. I feel like this video doesn’t have a proper intro or outro to it. So I plan on shooting some shots for that, also there doesn’t seem to be a lot of different kinds of shots so I’ll endeavour to do that as well. I plan on shooting different panning shots as I feel I didn’t shoot good enough shots to make the cut on the first take. However this time around I do have a better idea of what I want to do.