I was busy with essays so I didn’t start editing until the day before the screening where we’re asked to screen our rough edits. So I quickly put something together the night before that. I was not worried about the visuals because I knew they’d connect seamlessly and make sense once I put them together. The only thing I was truly concerned about was the sound. I knew that I’d be unsatisfied if I just looked for a piece of music and put it on the track. I’d absolutely, undeniably detest it. And I’d hate myself for not trying hard enough on that with this film, which I care about so much. So when I was at the presentation at TV Culture, I started to think about what style of a song that I’d go for. It’d only been a split second since I started thinking that I had got a piece of rhythm with words emerge in my mind. “I’m just a part time human…”, it was fashionably slow and low on tempo. I was in class and a group was doing their presentation so I couldn’t just pull out my phone and hum it out and record it. So I sang it in my head again and again, trying to imprint it in my brain to a point where I couldn’t forget. After the class I went to get a bubble tea and as I was waiting, I pulled out my phone to come up with some lyrics. I thought of A’s feelings as an AI who’s living in a society where her race is seen as either a threat or slaves. She was designed to be just like humans, she feels all the love and pain just like we do. She sees herself as a human being but is torn by the fact that she is undeniably an AI. She tried to seek out for support but most of the times she was either hurt or disappointed. All she wants is acceptance. All she wants is to be treated equally. With all this analysis that I could think of, I wrote this:
I’m just a part time human
Not your toy, not your enemy
And I’m a full time lover,
Can you feel it can you feel it
My heartbeat underneath my skin
Oh won’t you touch me, come on let me in
I’m just a part time human
I struggled to figure out the third line because I couldn’t think of something that rhymes with ‘human’ but also fits the story. So I settled with ‘lover’, as A is a lover of all. She loves all humans and all creatures. She’d never think about hurting others. It’s her nature. I also made a double rhyme (I don’t even know the actual term for that thing) with ‘heartbeat’ & ‘touch me’ and ‘skin’ & ‘in’. It was unintentional but perfect and I’m very proud of myself for coming up with that. So by the time my bubble tea was done, I’d already gotten what I could sing in the song. I was thinking for the song to go with the last scene where she walked towards the bathroom. So even though the song was not long, it was long enough for the scene.
I got back home to set up my microphone and opened Garageband to start working on it. It didn’t take me long to find out the base tunes with a keyboard sound and I added some strings in chords to enrich the texture and eventually the beats. I thought it’d be hard to find a beat that fit but I actually got the ideal one in 2 attempts. And then it’s the singing. I imagined that I was Lana Del Rey while doing it so it turned out to be really emo but that’s fine because I loved Lana Del Rey too much to not imitate her. I wouldn’t say that I was really satisfied with the result but it was good enough to show people. And I processed it to Audition and did some modulation so it’d sound distant and airy and echoy. Here’s what it looks like on Garageband.
AND it’s time to put the music and the clips together. I was really excited and very pleased with what I had made until they’re put together. And I wanted to kill myself for even going this far with sound because they did not fit. It felt like a Walmart version of “I Don’t Wanna Live Forever” (a song by Taylor Swift and Zayn Malik, also the theme song of Fifty Shades Darker) playing to the Walmart version of Ex Machina. After 20 minutes of trying to get over the embarrassment of creating such things my senses and logic came back to me and started to analyze why I did not like it. And here are some possible reasons:
a) The song was 10 times better when it’s in my head. My composing skills and Garageband skills were not good enough to copy and past what I had in mind.
b) I didn’t think about how long it should be and the timing when I was creating the music. The audio and video should be more in sync like certain beats and rhythms should go with certain actions.
c) I get embarrassed by the stuff I make all the time.
Anyways, it’s already super late and I did some color grading before I left it there for good as I might go crazy if I kept working on it. Eventually I still decided to keep the song in the part but I also did other edits using the same clips but with the monologue.
I was really, really, really surprised by the reaction of the class when they saw my edits. I was nervous as hell when the song was about the come up but felt relieved when I saw they seemed to like it. And it was at that moment that I realized that you never knew if the audience’s going to like it until you put it out there. What you’re concerned about might be something that they found very interesting. My own subjective opinions suddenly did not affect me so much and I think I’ve grown to enjoy what I made. Now I even find it funny that I suffered that big of a trauma and thought it was an epic fail when I first made it. I’m not saying that I think it’s perfect now but I’m definitely less panicked and embarrassed when I show it to people. With all the kind comments that I’ve received, I’m definitely more confident about it now.
I guess the music is a good start for me. And I started to edit the texting part. It was extremely hard because I had to locate each sent messages and received messages to cut them out and had to find the proper expressions after she’s seen a text and them chuck them in between the texts. I spent the longest time editing the texting scene and then the hallucination part. Man I wish I had a whole wall of screens so I could see all the clips simultaneously.
The bit where I struggled the most was where A hallucinated. Supposedly, she starts to hallucinate, then it’s the POV shot, and the tracing shot from the front, she looks down and looks up, and then sees the girl who says “you’re not one of us”, she’s scared and panicked to a climax, then she blinks, sees it’s only a random person on her phone, she feels relived and also confused about what she just saw. But when I was editing the “you’re not one of us” part, I found that A’s eye lines were messed up, the continuity was broken and there’s not enough footage to fix it or do it in a different way. It’d only confuse the audience if I’d insisted to leave the bit there. Even though the part was meant to be a climax of the whole scene, I had to kill my darling for the film to make sense.
I was kind of shocked by how the sideway tracking shot of A’s profile turned out. I thought it was too wobbly and shaky because I walked sideways to shoot that, so I used wrap stablizer effect on that and It became shaky but the shakiness was in slo-mo. It looked perfect for a hallucination. Again, you never know what’s going to turn out to be good or bad.
For the color grading in general, I used orange and blue as the main colors because a) that’s what Maddy proposed and b) they actually fit the moods. Maddy and I talked about the transition of color from blue to orange or vise versa as the plot developed so I tried to use different color grading in the same scene. It happened when A started hallucinating after she’d put her phone in her pocket. The color scheme changed to blue in contrast to the previous warm orange that had been there since the start of the scene. I thought it conveyed the switch of mood very thoroughly as the color scheme changed, it was very interesting to look at as well.
For the sound, it’s mostly atmospheric soundtrack and the song that I composed with a couple of royalty free sound effects that I downloaded online. The most fun part was the POV shot where I put a ‘Poltergeist’ sound effect to it, it sounds like a haunting ghost laughing and mumbling around. Without the visuals, it’d sound like a horror film. Originally I wanted to put something like a whispering sound, so it’d sound like A was hearing all those inner voices of people and realizing they’re judging and saying mean things about her. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any suitable whispering sound effect so I had to settled with ‘Poltergeist’. It didn’t sound too bad.
Here’s what the final edit of my part looks like:
It was a magic moment when the four of us put our individual films together and made it a whole. The first time we watched the complete film all together in the editing suite, we cheered like we’re four moms watching our kid score for his team in a football game, like we’d never been so proud of something in our lives. I’m so proud of us.
Overall, the editing was not easy and even a bit torturous on the brain but I somehow managed to figure a way out and I’m glad that I’ve gained some new skills on editing, color grading and sound design. Anyways, I love the result and how it looks and sounds in the end, somethings could have been done better if I had had more knowledge to it but I guess it’s all part of the learning process.