I’ve decided while I wait for my film to be developed that I would find some creative commons digitised miniDV film to try and ‘edit’ to get a sense of what I’ll need to do with my film once its developed. A lot of work will have to go into colour grading the film and not trying to completely improve the quality but to accentuate some colours or sharpen the image in some aspects to improve the film (this is something I’ll have to follow up with James.)

Original stock footage screenshot:

Improving the colour, and sharpening the image is only one aspect of the edit that I need to focus on (or maybe not) it really depends on the aesthetic that I attempt to create for the film. Another aspect of the editing I need to focus on is the cutting and structure of the film, but I can’t make a start on that until I receive all the footage back from PhotoQ. And on top of this I also need to figure out a narration or something to go over the top of the film to unify the structure of the film, however I feel as if this will come in later in the piece after I start editing and cutting the footage.

Screenshot #1:

Screenshot #2:

To explain what I’ve done in the first screenshot I’ve put a LUTS filter on the shot and touched up on the colour wheels and sharpened the quality. Within the second screenshot I added another present in the ‘creative’ section of the colouring panel and sharpened the quality as well as played around with the saturation.

However after manipulating the footage with colour grading and other fun stuff I’ve realised that I don’t necessarily need to edit the footage in this way. I feel like this because it loses the tape aesthetic and the home movie feel because the footage is essentially manipulated. So after experimenting with this stock footage I’ve made the decision to not colour grade or manipulate the footage in that way and instead focus on the scenes and shots that I put into the film more so then the overall quality of the end product. Of course I want to create a project of a high quality, but rather the quality of the overall film more so then picturesque quality.

References:

Sample MiniDV footage, YouTube,The Digital Transfer / Le Transfert Digital, pub. 26 October 2014, viewed. 18/09/18, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ij6sGX8FiX8>