#;stage6

Final Cut

2nd & 3rd April | Second Cut

After showing our first cut during our last tutorial we made some changes in increasing the B story of the sound effects of the International Space Station, as well as quickening the pacing of the visuals in the middle to give it some rhythm. We’ve also colour graded and corrected the shots. 

While we were editing we also noticed how shaky the 50mm prime lens shot were, and we should’ve really taken out a monopod or steadicam in order to minimise relying on warp stabiliser.

We’re pretty satisfied with this cut however we’ll continue fine tuning any technical issues and colour grading. Such as the timelapse of the sun rise and set still bothers me as it jumps slightly because we could not manage a smooth timelapse, moving parts and shifting them around. 

We also realise we’re pretty messy with our editing tracks:

during tutorial we showed the rough cut and gotten feedback and what we can work on to make it better. Though we knew of certain technicalities that needed fine tuning but we got a few ideas or changing some of the shots as well:

 [sound]

- EQ, fix some of the foleys, VO competing with music in the middle

- there’s a subtle B story line of the ISS communication with the space control center, we could possibly add a bit more sound effects to enhance that story line further

 [visuals]

- too many generic day shots, put in some night shots? The day green shots don’t seem to be working as hard as the night shots (eg the grass, the flowers generic nature shots) why not have something different compared to the usual generic shots of nature that are pretty but everyone has seen already?

- Middle part with the Grandpa Music should pick up the pace, with visual editing

After being introduced to Matty Brown I decided to research further into his style of films and watch a few more:

Matty Brown has a very distinct style of editing his work and I truly admire the way he focuses more on the emotion of the shots than to coherency of the shots. Its quite amazing the way he edits and makes it very attuned to how people can feel just by watching it. Music plays a big part in his editing which I get very inspired by as music often drives the way and tone that I edit in and I can truly look up to his style of filming and editing. Right down to the way he’s already thinking about editing while he’s filming, I feel like that’s something we needed to think more of during our time filming. That’s what we want to achieve as well, to make people feel something when they watch the short film.

During the weekend as well I proceeded to look through the rushes and picked out the shots to be used. I think what we realised was that we had a lot more nice, day shots than night shots, while we were still concerned about the grain and all that from our night shots. We decided to simply threw together a sequence of day to night for the visual first before we met up together to get both the visuals, VO and music to one coherent piece. 

When Ian and I came together over the week we put together the rough cut and realised the the atmospheric sounds could play such a huge part in the film. As I was editing the cut without atmospheric sounds at first, there were a lot of times where the VO was not happening and it was slightly boring. The idea of throwing in the sounds of one of NASA’s launch and communication to the astronauts on the ISS was one of our favourite things to throw in, when it brought a certain charm to it, like the extra imagination of the girl, dreaming of being a part of that one day as he wrote her letter to the moon.

One of the toughest things while doing this was melding together to different tracks of music because our initial piece “Grandpa” though sounded amazing, was perhaps too stagnant in the certain tone, volume and pace throughout. We wanted to give it some pacing and breathing spaces and thus introduced a second track. It took awhile and we had to stop and come back the next day with fresh ears once more but we made it work for at least a rough cut.

Day 1 | 20th March

Ellie and I reached Shillington on Monday and began shooting the sunset as we got there as well as all the night nature and village shots. We were pretty happy with the decision of spending the money to take the train to be able to catch the sky while on it and the transition from city to country. During the early night we managed to walk around the village to get some night shots, also giving us an extra luxury of time to test again with the camera settings. Going there a day early was probably the best decision we made with the whole day raining, it cleared up the night amazingly. Thus it gave us our one opportunity to get the moon. However we made the one big mistake of not checking where the moon rise or the moon’s track in the sky and we placed and calibrated the telescope in Ellie’s garden at the back of the house which could not view the moon. Instead the moon was best viewed from the front of the house and that was probably one of the bigger mistakes we made on the shoot. However the telephoto lens did pull through as we managed to get a nice shot of the moon even though we couldn’t get any close up shots with the telescope. That night we almost planned for the shots for the next day and what to do when to try and maximise the time.

Day 2 and 3 | 21st & 22nd March

We slept from 6am to 11am and when the rest of the crew came we began most of the scripted shots. I think what we failed too anticipate would be too much daylight time, there were periods where we were simply waiting for the sun to lower to the horizon. We spent a lot of that time trying to get more atmospheric sounds doing timelapses and we tried to fill the time and then when it got to the magic hour, it was just a frantic rush to get shots.  The last few shots on the hills got harder and harder to take as we were running out of light and perhaps what we should’ve done we to not follow the timeline of the sequence of events in the script and actually go to the hills to film the telescope set up before filming all the house shots because the lights there were much easier to control. There was quite a lot of yelling here and there on the hills and it was freezing at 3 degrees, but of course, all the yelling was out of love! 

But it was stressful to try and fight nature and time itself. Not to mention the hail and rain that unexpectedly happened in the afternoon, nature was really not on our side. As night fell we slept from 10pm to 3am, waking up hopeful to get the moon, and this time with the telescope in the right area. And we woke up to clouds. Guess we had to be expecting that with the weather saying some clouds, but it was a bummer that we waiting till dawn with not even a glimpse of the moon. Most of the bad things balanced out with the good thing of coming in a night early or the whole trip might’ve been quite a pity. Nevertheless as Team B left both teams looks out at the beautiful sunrise we managed to catch, and we can’t deny that the shoot trip wasn’t a good one.

As a team we all bonded really well together, though even at the start of shoot we weren’t to certain on who would be good at what technical role, but we learnt along the way, Elisha helps greatly with gaffer and lights, Ian took control of the sound and atmosphere and helped as second camera, and I helped to handle most of the technicals of shooting at night having tried out astrophotography in the past. Our team wasn’t generally the strongest in our technical skills and that had us worried for a bit but I think overall we really pulled through and everyone was such a good sport about sleeping at the most awkward times and waking up at 3am just to see the moon (who totally stood us up).