Week 12

In the last few days of our term it became clear I didn’t have the time to produce a final cut that met our high expectations, and I therefore planned to come up on the 9^th of January, 5 days before the film was due. The whole reshoot process had admittedly left us tight for time, but I was positive I could tie it all together in the short amount we had.

We were also short on time because of fundamental changes made to the film’s structure. While our first two scenes were gripping and exciting, the last three revealed more about Beth’s and Jamie’s relationship, so were naturally dialogue heavy. As a result of this, the second half of the film felt dull and anticlimactic, not living up to the promise of the first two scenes. I decided to keep the same opening scene (Beth’s initial reaction to the murder), but then show the preceding events in order, instead of playing in reverse chronology from the murder backwards. Having the opening scene serve more as a ‘flash-forward’ to the ending established a more consistent and impactful pace, giving the uptight and threatening atmosphere in the dialogue scenes the space to escalate at a natural rhythm, until finally exploding in the climax.

I wanted to leave university with a fine cut of both the original structure and my altered one, as our group could analyse it over the break and I could return to editing with a fresh mind and a precise idea of what needed to be done. I exported my work as a .mov and then uploaded it to Vimeo, which said it would take a few hours to finalise. It was only on my journey home that I tried to view it on my laptop and saw there had been an upload error. I didn’t understand codecs and that the way I encode a file will affect the devices it can be played on, a mistake that cost me valuable time as I wasn’t able to watch my film at home.

When I finally got the chance to edit on the 9^th, I was able to send the crew both fine cuts through using Adobe Media Encoder. I found the application’s design clearer and more intuitive than Avid, as I simply had to drag and drop a codec that would suit streaming services onto my .mov file.

My group agreed that the changed structure made the film more dynamic and coherent, meaning it was time to perfect the picture and move on to the colour grade and audio edit.

I was confident I could complete these two remaining tasks in the 3 days I had left, assuming everything went according to plan. Only it didn’t. I had offloaded the original footage and the reshot footage onto Avid through two separate computers, and it was at this point I realised how difficult reconnecting the two would be. To make matters worse, I discovered the magnitude of this problem on Friday afternoon, meaning there would be no staff around to show me how to solve it until the day the film was due. The situation was too complicated to explain via email, although it didn’t stop me trying, and after my workshop tutor couldn’t find a solution, me and the director made the decision to grade our film through Avid to make the best use of our time. Because we were editing with reduced-quality copies of the original files, colour adjustments were more harsh and severe, which made the aesthetics of some shots erratic and inconsistent. My most important and unexpected takeaway from this project is just how essential offloading and formatting your footage correctly is. I’ve learnt to not take shortcuts or act carelessly when it comes to ‘data wrangling’, as I’ve now experienced the colossal impact it can have.

Despite my troubles with grading, I found mixing the audio to be relatively straightforward and rewarding. Apart from Beth’s screams occasionally clipping (due to the mic sensitivity being too high when recording), there were no major problems with the audio. I especially enjoyed applying and customising the effects on Ben’s dialogue to make his voice sound as if it was coming through the phone, adding a sense of immersion and realism to the film.

I uploaded the final cut to YouTube and shared with my team, who all agreed they were happy with the end product. Finally, with a sense of pride and relief, I pressed submit.

Week 11

There were some complications in organising this week’s reshoots, as Rebecca told us she was ill and couldn’t make it. But after some encouragement from our producer, she agreed to film for a few hours on the 11^th of December at 3:00pm. This meant we stuck to an extremely strict schedule, and made sure we understood and planned every shot in order to use our time most efficiently.

During our reshoots we encountered a complication with the Zoom F4 where the audio would only record onto the left earphone. This was a huge obstacle, and threatened to derail our whole day of filming. However, because I had spent the time during pre-production to learn the intricacies of this equipment I was able to identify and fix the problem confidently and efficiently.

In some cases, the actors changed positions between takes which made for an extremely obvious breach of continuity when the clips were edited together. With this in mind, during the reshoots we tried to maintain the continuity as best as possible, with the producer taking pictures during takes to refer back to in later shots. Despite this, I thought that many of the film’s cuts still came across as fairly distracting and unnatural, and that there was more I could do to make some of my cuts feel even more seamless.

I’ve recently read about the method of seamless editing in Ken Dancyger’s book, The Technique of Film &Video Editing (2019, 6^th Ed). He states that “Any action that offers a distinct movement or gesture provides an opportunity within a shot for a cut” (2019, pp,395). An example of the ‘matching action’ he describes is when I cut from a two-shot to a close up of Jamie. I had the actor turn his head at the end of the two-shot and at the beginning of the close up. This gave me a clear edit point to make between the two clips, and improved the scene’s fluidity and sense of rhythm. He also affirms that “A cut is a promise of more information or more dramatic insight to come” (2019, pp.399). My example adheres to this. At the point where Beth angrily asks Jamie why he was so late he sounds guilty and ashamed, literally turning to hide his face. This is a key moment in the film where the audience are made to sympathise with Jamie, and my editing tries to heighten this sense of emotion and drama by moving to a close up, which exaggerates facial expressions and makes the audience feel more connected to the character.

Just as we were finishing up for the day, I had the sudden idea to record a lengthy audio track of Beth’s initial cries. Where we had originally planned to have our quick-cut opening sequence play in silence, I thought that her alarmed and hysterical screams would add some much-needed emotion and energy to the static shots.

While comparing what we shot to our original footage, it became apparent there was an inconsistency. For our reshoots our camerawoman was unable to make it, so the director had to stand in for her role. He was unfamiliar with the camera’s complex settings and didn’t match the white balance to our previous shots, resulting in all of our reshot footage having a noticeable yellow tint. Although this was distracting and ruined any sense of immersion, we hoped it was fixable when it came to colour grading.

Week 9 + 10

We wanted our opening to be gripping and engaging, and decided to film close ups of the unexplained carnage and cut quickly between them, creating an atmosphere of disorientation and panic within the audience. This is what Roland Barthes calls Enigma Codes, which are an element of the story that is not fully explained, and makes the audience question its meaning or significance. While conceptually our idea was strong, we didn’t anticipate how many shots were needed for this scene and our subsequent lack of footage resulted in an opening that felt disjointed, the indistinct and elongated shots completely destroying the tension I’d had hoped for.

We soon encountered another problem while assembling the film. We had planned our shot types for the dialogue-heavy scenes to be mostly two-shots, with us then cropping and zooming in on the actors faces instead of filming separate reaction shots as it would save time on set. However, while editing we found the quality of the image became grainy and pixelated. Feeling that the assembly cut didn’t match the potential we thought our ideas had, we decided to organise a day of reshoots where we’ll fix these two problems, as well as some more minor issues such as re-filming dialogue that was delivered unclearly.

Once our clips were assembled into a loose structure I began to start tinkering with the smaller aspects. There were instances where some of the shots had glaring errors but because it may have been the only take of a certain shot, I was forced to come up with creative solutions. Throughout the initial editing process, I became more familiar with the various abilities of the effect palette, something that I feel has improved the final outcome of our film.

For instance, when a light was visible in an exterior shot of Jamie, I had to use the resize tool to crop out and exclude the light’s glare. Another example is the close up of Jamie’s shoe. It begins as blurry and gradually comes into focus, lingering for a while to emphasise his lifeless body. However, the camera then loses focus again as it holds on his foot, rendering the shot useless. To work around this, I found the frame where his shoe was most in-focus, and used the freeze frame tool to extend this frame for the rest of the clip. As there was no movement in the shot, I was able to use this technique without it being noticeable. I also had to use the stabliser on some shots where the camera shakes excessively, although the application of this tool is very straightforward and requires no skill.

By the end of these two weeks, I had a rough cut that acted as a template for our final vision, leaving lots of wriggle room in between edits to give us maximum flexibility and to not confine our options. I struggled to make much progress after this, as the missing chunks of our film we haven’t yet reshot make it impossible to know how certain sequences will fit together. This is especially noticeable for our opening scene, which as it stands is just a montage of stagnant objects that ends with Beth’s piercing screams, as our footage of Jamie’s bloody corpse is unusable for the most part.