Fiction Adaptation - Editing and Graphics Effects

With the editing it was a long, long process of putting the clips together, colour matching and grading, adding effect to the shots, then adding the music and sounds took me 3 days to perfect. I started by lining everything up on the time line in the order that I wanted to come in.

The first problem after assembling the time line was the duration, 6 mins 36 secs. I was over by a minute and a half which meant cutting out a lot of shot which I wanted including most of my intro of David arriving in his and and entering the pub which I particularly liked. 

After a painful cut down it was time to put in the poem voice over and put the pieces into place. This was another problem as I found most of the voice over, in one main part of the story. This was because I tried to fit too many shot relating to the poem in a short amount of time, which lead to a mash up of the poem in one bulk. This made it look rushed when read and hard to follow the story. I over came this by stretch the voice over a little, even if it didn't perfectly match up wight he visual, as long as they were close by. From this I've learnt that I should story board and shot list better in order to know where everything is going to go and have all the space for it when editing. 

After this I turned my attention to the effect which I could do with out after effects. The first thing I did was add video filter to some clips and mad some clips darker. For the stabbing scene I added a glow and distortion to make the effect of the stab more visible in the film. I then added a black and white filter to the POV's of David as I agreed on doing to add the effect of his world coming apart. Then I added a triply up side down rain effect on a part where David is meant to be sleeping, to add the illusion of a dream. Then I added a darker ting to the forest scene to make it more creepy and mysterious. After that I made a part of the film flicker with colour to fit with the part of the poem in which is starts saying colours. And finally I added some masks to the face of dead to cover any of Chris' face popping out and added a glow and TV filter to the flash backs to make them stand out as flash backs. 

After I did all I could with Final cut I turned to after effects. In after effects, the main bulk of my work was the flash back, as I wanted to start it with a Tv, when have it showing static, then cut to a static shot of the start of the flash back in the TV and then cut to the flashback. Then back out of the flash back in the same way.

After Ruby took over and as I was tweaking a mistake I had made with the edit she carefully made the poppy stay red and leave the rest of the shot in black and white. She did this quite quickly as she has done 4 time for her film and became a master.

After this I did an easy and simple effect where I blended 3 shots together to get a cloudy and glowing night sky. I got 3 royalty free clips, one of dark clouds, one of stars and one of the northern light, I then simple added a key light to the sky and light and put them together and put the stars underneath.  

 The final thing I did was to tidy up a blood effect which I shot wrong on the first day of filming. I left too big a gap between the actress and the blood, so you could tell it was coming from her. I simple added the 3 individual clips and created a mask round the blood, then copied it and moved it to cover up the gap.

Overall I am very pleased with the whole editing and ager effect sessions as I believe that I have seriously improved my skills and ability to use the soft wear professionally. However I need to learn to get some shot right when filming to avoid rush in after effect to tidy it up, as sometime it doesn't look as good as if was done properly.