Creative Critical Reflection - How does your product use or challenge conventions?

 

Creative Critical Reflection - How did you intergrade technologies - software, hardware and online - in this project?

 

Creative Critical Reflection - How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text?

 

Creative Critical Reflection - How did your skills developed throughout this project?

 

Metamorphosis - Final Cut

 

Editing Day 3 - Putting the Fine Tooth Comb Over

 Day Three is upon us, time to use the Filmic Reactions to guide my fine tooth comb to success.

First thing, I cut the phone zoom shot. Automatically make the shock of the sound and flow of the scene better.

Second thing second, I need to lower and adjust audio. Carrion's dialog is really low and adjusting the hum and buzz of my AC is a pain. So what I did was make the non-dialogue bits quite with the dialogue bits loud, the add a cross-fade to blend them together. Alongside that my song "Surprise" has a very loud and obnoxious sound right in the middle of the coffee making scene. It's not too hard to remove, all it needs is some looping and a cross-fade.

The section of audio where I looped the audio

Third thing, I need to rotoscope a bunch of shots. Namely the two major complaints from the feedback, the bright folder and the final shot. While the final shot is no where near hard as it's a literal box, the folder is precarious. Hands will fold over it and complicate the rotoscope, along side the major camera shake each shot has. I got a few done but the scope of the rotoscope has grown substantially and I realize just how much I need to do to get everything right. This just shows me how even if you think your close, you may be leaps and bounds away from what the goal actually is.

 

Filmic Reactions

 With 2 days into post production, I'd say now is a good time to show off what  have. Outside feedback is the only real way to get that objective beating that you need to improve your output, and I want this to be as good as possible.

So, some post beating notes. First is that certain colors and shading is pretty distracting. Namely the shots of the table with the yellow folder and the final shot. The folder is very bright, a harsh yellow color. This does not blend well with the more monotone colors all around him. The final shot has a lot of shadows and bright colors aside from Carrion of which you should be looking at. It's very distracting and takes away from the film.

 

Photos of the two shot I described.

Second necessary change is a very loud violin sound in the music track. Again, very distracting and breaks the flow of the film.

One change that could be done is getting rid of a zoom shot of the phone. Just like the Violin sound, it distracts and ruins the pacing of the film. Removing it is a good way of adding more of a shock to the phone ringing and making the pace of it smoother.

The phone zoom shot

All of these criticisms were not stuff I would think of on my own, aside from the violin thing. Having people to show and get their feedback is ultra important if you want your product to be good.

Editing Day 2 - Putting the Puzzle Together

 The second day of editing went just as well as the second day of shooting, really well!

Timeline we're starting off with

As soon as we finished filming everything, I recorded my voice lines for the boss and put the shots in. Once that was done and everything is isolated, I immediately set out to replace the old shots and get the old unusable shots out. Just so I don't forget and don't have to worry about it. After that I add the rest of the clips in order with them cut down. 

Old vs. new shots

Now It's time to cut the first part down even more. The goal is to make it look like a montage. It does get kind of precarious because sometimes you forget how hard on the cuts to go. You want it to be fast but going to hard makes it hard to interoperate. Thankfully, our actor is also an editor, so he gives me some tips and shows me some jump cuts that are possible. This ends up getting around half a minute cut, a major win.

Now, all the visual and foundational stuff is in. All that's left is some sound details. We'll get those sounds off YouTube, its the easiest source and is gets us good results. I used the Telephone Ringing sfx by Isolation music, Creepy Ambient Drone Sfx by SoundEffectFactory, and Franz Joseph Haydn "Surprise."

All this ended me off with this timeline work and my first real cut of the opening.

Timeline after the day.

Filming - Day 2

 The second day of production, and also the final! We came together and did something we didn't have last time, form a more concrete plan. We would first do some set preparation alongside some light shot prep. Also this time we need the audio from this shoot, so I make sure to gather all the Wild sound necessary.

We start by retaking the first and second table shots as they were the ones ruined by the dishes. Next we do with the close ups of Carrion writing. These are easy but we need to start with this as we will be ruining the set with the coffee spill. So we do each shot as they come in the Shot log and Storyboard. This makes it easier to know what comes next, and thanks to our extra preparation and prior experience it all goes very smoothly.

The shots with Carrion talking was ones we took a lot of thought in. They’re the only ones with dialogue so we wanted to make sure Carrion was clear to see. We ended up using very simple shots to clearly show him and his reactions to the discussion happening.

We finished up with doing the mirror shot which took the most time and attempts as it’s hard to show the mirror without showing the camera. But we planned out how that would work so it wasn’t too hard to figure out the method.

Simple and effective planning carried this filming session. We were able to go in, and knock everything out within only 2 hours instead of the large amount of time we took last time. If you want to film anything, make sure you plan It out very well.

Editing Day 1 - Putting the pieces together

Time to put everything together, the long and arduous process of the edit. There's a decent amount of footage to sort together so lets see where I end up. Remember that the end goal is to hit a time of 2:00 exactly. 

What the timeline looks like at first

Once we get the footage into the computer, I need to chop it up into the individual shots. The way I imported it was lobbing it into one to save time and many headaches, so this is the necessary sacrifice.

Next I need to put them into place. I usually like to cut them down to size at the same time because it makes it easier to see what the final cut looks like. There isn't a need to wait till its all together to get to chopping as long as you have your shot log with ya.

With that out of the way, I automatically see an small hiccup which could either be good or bad. With the shots all cut and spliced together, I see our run-time is about 1:20. This means that we'd barely would have time to finish the rest of this scene once it's cut to size. And I definitely cannot put the second scene we had planned in. This leaves us to just finish off scene one and doing effective cuts to the time down. Even though we severely overestimated what was necessary to film, we can turn this mistake into a happy accident Bob Ross style.

Timeline at the end of the day

Filming - Day 1

 Now, time to start the production!

We are starting off with a basic plan, get all of the kitchen shots done. However we need to set up the scene due to the fact Carrion's cabinet is empty. So we put all the dishes onto the table, this will bite me later on when we’re about to finish filming. After about 30 minutes of preparation, we actually begin

We start by getting all of the Kitchen shots made. We do it in order from the walk in onward, each shot needing only 1-3 takes at most. It's going relatively smoothly as we have a plan for some shots, but we really don’t have too much directive for a lot of these shots. We need to be more organized as we barely got all of the kitchen shots done in the 2 1/2 hours we had.

Once we got all the kitchen shots, we only had time for 3 more. We did two at the table, which are unusable due to all the dishes that were on it ruining the shot. The last one we did was the shot where Carrion grabs the notebook, which is usable. 

Overall, we need to plan out shots and have better coordination when it comes to filming for the next time so that we don’t have issues like this time. You need a firm plan to have a smooth production, and I’ll make sure to have that all ready.