This week I edited together the first scene of Touch On/Touch Off. It definitely helped to have done a test shoot for this scene beforehand, because I knew exactly what shots we needed to get and I knew how I was going to edit it together. This gave me the chance to fix a couple of things that were wrong in my test shoot. For example, I created a more dynamic lighting style, using artificial lights coming through the right-hand side window and a soft light coming from above. I also punched the wide shot in slightly closer:

Unfortunately, I had the exact same problem with pulling focus as I did in the test shoot. Even with a focus puller, it was incredibly hard to get the actor as well as the phone in focus within the same shot, because the 50mm lens I was using has such a shallow depth of field and it is also difficult to tell whether or not the subject/object is in focus on my tiny display screen. I think what happened is that I had marked lines for my focus puller on my camera’s focal rim for the first take (which was in focus, but was framed incorrectly and is thus unusable) and then at one point the focus puller slightly kicked the tripod and the actor also moved slightly, but we didn’t change the focus marks. Hence, the actor appears slightly out of focus while he is on the phone. For this reason, I think we will have to cut back to a wide shot once the phone is picked up.

I spent more time editing the sound for this scene in comparison to the test, because it was 1. more important and 2. a much easier process editing the ‘properly’ recorded audio, rather than the audio I had captured with my DSLR camera. I think this is one of the reasons why this scene flows so much better than my test shoot.

In class this week we also did some colour grading. I’ve hardly touched scene one yet, aside from saturating it to highlight the colours to make it seem ‘happy’ and ‘morning-like’. However, I think I will work on this scene a bit more so that all the shots match each other in colour tone. I will also use the masking tool, as I have done below, to spotlight some of the points within the frame e.g. the watch.