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Friday 12 December 2008
Well, the documentary is finished and all is handed in. Joy! I've sill got some stuff to post up here but ultimately it's done. The best thing now is to reflect up what we have done and achieved during this project. On a more relevant note, I've taken this long yet important extract from Ollie's blog. He has been keeping an editing diary which has gone into our final production file. If you'd like to look at his blog its here-------> Ollie Tristram's Blog
Wednesday 26th November
We captured the footage to the computer and watched through it all. It came out as 4.5GB and 21 minutes in length, which according to Jules is about the right ratio for a 4 minute film. We didn't get time to do any work on it but Tom offered to cut up all the footage into individual clips at home, so it was easier to rearrange them for our editing.
Thursday 27th November
Today started with us imported all the separated clips, Tom had kindly spliced last night, into Adobe Premiere. It was very hand for him to have done that because it made life so much easier to just scroll through a list of clips and pick out the ones we wanted in a particular order.
Next, we simply began choosing clips, placing them in a provisional order and then began cutting them up - very straight-forward.
After doing so, and getting over 1 minutes worth of footage on the timeline, we began to take a look at the audio files we had recorded during the shooting. The live recording of the busker playing is fine, but we don't want to settle for second best, and we would be doing so if we kept our interview audio file. We have decided that there is too much hustle and bustle in the background, and not only does it make the interview more unclear, but there are sudden cuts between each section of speech. Anyway, we have booked out a sound booth and will be rerecording the interview on Monday.
Wednesday 3rd December
Today Jason was off ill with a cold so Tom and I continued with some of the editing ourselves.
We applied some visual effects to the footage in order to try and get that urban, gritty city look to our film. We did this by applying high contrast and lowering the saturation of the clips.
Also today, the other groups came to look at our edit. The general feedback was that it looked nice and the shots were well framed, but they thought because of our effects that the shot looked over-exposed.
Thursday 4th December
With Jason back in we showed him our new visual style and he liked it a lot. We didn't really do much else to the edit today because Debs came round to give constructive criticism. Generally I think she was quite impressed and the overall tips to take away from her feedback was to rearrange some of the clips as not to mislead the audience (for example, introducing the busker at the right time) and to go all or nothing with the effects so that nobody thinks its over-exposed and knows that we have applied effects.
Also, some filming tips I learnt was that one performing a pan, it counts as 3 shots: still, move, still. This way any still clips that come after it fit nicely. The other tip was to make sure in the future to always use manual controls - exposure in particular. We remembered white balance and manual focus but a couple of the shots that go from light to dark see the auto exposure kick in and the white colour fades in and out making it look more unprofessional.
Our main aim for today was to rerecord the interview with Sam and we booked out a sound booth and Edirol R-09 to redo this today. At 16.30 Sam turned up and we began interviewing. Compared the interview on the street we got a lot more audio, 17 minutes worth in fact, and we got everything we wanted out of him except him talking about other buskers, which was one of the main things we wanted for the voice over of our film!
When I got home that night I spliced up the interview into bite size segments with only the best and most clear parts of the interview. This cut down the 17 minutes into around 6 minutes of roughly 25 clips. This way the edit the next day will be easier to pick and choose each audio file we want.
Friday 5th December
Today our aim was to rearrange some of the clips, but most importantly to put the new audio on the film.
It started off kind of slow, picking the most related audio clips to go with their video counterparts, but once that was sorted we trawled through the rest of the interview/voice-over clips, picked out the best and placed them in the gaps where they fitted best.
When we were happy with the order the main thing to do now was to sort out the levels for the three audio tracks: the live recording, interview and city ambiance. One technique which was important for us to do was the use of ducking the live recording whenever Sam spoke during the voice-over, to make him clearly and more prominent in the audio mix. I spent a good hour or so going through the timeline and fluctuating the audio levels via use of automation at the appropriate parts.
FINISHED! Well not quite. But we were for the day. All that is left is for Tom to put the text on screen when the busker says the important stand-out lines.
Monday 8th December
Today we heard some more feedback from Jools and we learnt of a couple of tweaks we needed to make to our film. The first thing was to rearrange some more clips, most notably the second shot was too dark following the first, bright shot. This was deleted completely. We even added in a new shot we forgot we had of Sam waving at a passer-by. It works because it shows Sam's pleasant attitude and the effect he has on the people.
Another main issue was hearing the sound of some speakers other than headphones. The mixing was fairly bad because there were times when Sam's interview could not be heard over the backing track. We had to get this sorted and we did so by altering the ducking of the backing track more severely.
A third thing to change was to add more text from what Sam says during the voice-over. This keeps in the style more and also helps the audience follow the narrative easier.
