Thursday, August 22, 2013

Filming, Editing and Sound

This post is going to be fairly long, as I haven't posted anything in a while, as I kept forgetting because I was very focused on getting the film completed, and I have a lot to say about the production of the project.

Audio:
Last weekend I finished my film. I worked on the sound most of the weekend, though I did touch up my movie a bit. The music was hard for me to do, because I'm not very good at music, though I think it sounds good and matches with the film and I am happy with how it turned out. I tried to make it suspenseful in the parts where it should be and more intense during parts such as the shooting of the boss. I also made the music quiet when dialogue was happening and also made the dialogue a bit louder so it was easier to hear. I rerecorded some audio for the dialogue as well because it wasn't very loud and the school band was playing in the background of the footage, so I thought it would be best to rerecord the audio rather than putting up with it, so now it sounds much better. Overall the music turned out well and I'm happy with how it matches the film, though there are a few times where it probably could have flowed better.
In class this week, because we got an extension, I worked on touching up the audio a bit by making the dialogue louder and the music softer in sections, I also touched up the editing a little. At one point, when I put the audio into Final Cut there was a section that went a bit static, so I had to start again by putting the audio in again. I also had to export the song again after Mr Andrews showed us the proper way to do it. 
I have now exported my entire movie with audio and I am happy with the final result and I am ready to hand it in tomorrow.

Filming and editing of the film:
Throughout the process of editing the film, my group had some troubles. We weren't communicating very well and we hadn't thought the storyline through to the potential we could have. We ended up having to record a lot more footage than we had and we had to record a lot of the old movie too, because Millie didn't bring the dress she was wearing in the old footage to school (she's a boarder so we didn't have access to it at all). We had some trouble whilst filming as well, as some of us couldn't make days that others could, but we eventually got all the filming done. 
Once the filming was complete we also had some trouble converting the footage to give to everyone, because Sasha did it all herself when we sere supposed to do it as a group, and then the rest of us had to convert other scenes and give it to everyone in the group. This took a while and Millie and I had to stay back after class to finish copying it over to everyone's USBs. After we'd done this, it was much more of an individual task, so there were much less problems. 
After I had renamed all the footage so I knew what every shot was of, I began editing my film. There were a few times that I forgot to set the scratch disks, but luckily I hadn't done much at all and could afford to start that section again. 
I did the film scene by scene but I compressed the scenes into only 5 so it was much easier to edit. The editing didn't take too long because I knew what I wanted to do, but it did take time and precision. I am happy with how I edited the film and I am extremely happy that I got it into the time limit of 4 minutes. 
I used colour and black and white to convey the flashbacks in the film. I also used fades to white for this. I put the present footage in colour and the flashbacks in black and white. To change from present to past, I used fades to white. To make the fades to white I used a brightness and contrast filter and put the brightness right up, like Mr Andrews showed us in class.
I had a couple issues with footage not being converted into the Apple Intermediate Codec but that was very easy to fix. 
Overall I had a good time completing the film but there were a lot of times that it got fairly stressful. I am very happy with how the film has turned out and I am glad that the project is finally over.

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