Post-Production: Week 24

Week 24 (Final Week) - Seminar & Editing

Tuesday 5th April:

• Today was the first editing session as a whole group - we all went to Milan's room (our editor) and stayed there for around 6 hours, all contributing to the editing process. 
  
  
  
  

  

  Giving my input on the duration of a clip

• Whilst there, we also did some more research. When it came to the scene where Rachel is walking into the library, we realised that there was a slight problem due to the large amount of people around the library. It had appeared in the shots when we looked back that Rachel seemed quite insignificant in shot as there were so many others around her that the audience couldn't really tell where she'd gone. I showed the group this Korean music video by a company called SM Entertainment where they've used three tiles to highlight a character.
  
  

  

  All three shots contain the same person

• We then used this influence to implement something similar into our short film where the camera narrows down to where she is in this long shot and doesn't look to cluttered as the bystanders are being eliminated from the scene.
• We finished implementing all of the scenes at the end of the day in this movie, however the text messages weren't finished and neither was the music. The inspiration we used for the text messages were taken from Sherlock. We wanted something that had that sort of style to it. Here is an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXQV-OQzN6c
  This allowed us to plan time to think about how we were going to implement something like that into our scenes. 

The group at Milan's

Thursday 7th April (Submission Day):

• Today we received feedback from Helen on our final rough cut of the film.
  List of things she wanted changed: - Sound of alarm in the morning
  - Music kicks in at split screen so it's in time with editing
  - Tinder match is unreadable, add a close up
  - Looks like Rachel is the one picking up pizza
  - Music must match editing
  - Flip a library shot because it looks like the same row/aisle
  - Jump cut of Rachel is too big
  - Hold one of Charlie's shots towards the end and cut out similar shots
  - Rachel has a left to right and right to left shot at the end so choose one or the other
• After we managed to fix all of that up, myself and Milan began working on the text animations using an animation guide we found online. I was able to create all the text messages and decided to export them into it's own clip with the texts appearing at their designated times. I then touched this up slightly and added a fade in Premiere Pro. 
• There was a slight problem with this as the text was too difficult to read amongst the background so we added a translucent rectangular box behind the text to make it more legible. 

The difference in the easy to implement text vs. the text myself and Milan worked on for over an hour

• We also had issues deciding how thick the bar should be in between Rachel and Charlie's halves of the screen: 

  

  Coming up with a side by side comparison allowed us to choose our favourite - Option 2

• After this we exported the whole film with the new music that was royalty free (found online) and also with the text messages that piece the whole film together. We were able to put it onto a memory stick, review it back as a group and were happy with the final product and submitted it. Altogether a good experience, next time I would probably choose a different role however as I'd get to learn more about filming from a different perspective. I would also ask to take part in editing more as I only really contributed verbally for the most part, giving my opinion and saying what should go where when putting the clips together etc as I really enjoyed creating the text messages and fitting them into the movie at the end.

The last group selfie before submission.