Construction post 6: Reflections on edit week 2

During the second edit week, we focused mainly on:

• Adding the shots from our back-up shoot and putting them into the chronological order on our timeline
• Finishing the titles and adding them onto our shots
• Grading our shots
• Editing the voice over and diegetic sound using 'audio equalizer'
• Putting transitions onto shots and titles
• Cutting down the timing by reducing the frames

Our editing schedule for week 2

There was a lot to do in the second week so it was crucial that we communicated with each other regularly to have clear understanding between us and to use our time most effectively. As you could see from our edit schedule, there was many periods where we were by ourselves as it was hard to fit the editing into our school timetable, let alone at the same time as each other. The main times when we were together as a group was during lunch time and after school. We texted each other a lot and even devised a post-it-note system where we noted down what we had done and what to do next. This proved very effective for our team.

Our post-it-note system

Whilst editing our sequence, we noticed that the lighting was not thorough throughout the conflict scene. I suspect that, because we filmed many master shots of the conflict scene, over time the sun must have gone behind the clouds causing the shot to be dark and undersaturated. We graded the shots so that they looked as similar as possible using the three way colour corrector.

The three way hue balance and angle

We tried to prioritise the visual of the trees because the trees took up the majority of the mise-en-scene. However this meant that, although the trees matched in terms of colour, Alex Brock's hair didn't. You can see that in the bottom photo, Alex's hair and Georgina's coat has a blue-green tint to it.

Georgina's jacket is white

Alex Brock's hair is blond

Both Georgina's coat and Alex's hair have a blue-green tint

The sepia effect that we were inspired by originally 

The issue of grading caused a large divide in our group because Georgina tended to increase the saturation by 60% using 'ProcAmp' and Olamide would add orange and blue on the 'Three Way Color Corrector', creating a sepia effect to make the orange and the blue stand out just like in the film 'Submarine'. I taught myself how to use 'lumetri color' to grade shots using the guide here and tried to make everything bright and vibrant. In the end, every shot looked different and Alex emphasised that we should be more subtle in grading our shots.

We eventually compromised by increasing the saturation by only 20% and adding subtle sepia and brightening effects.

However, I noticed that some of our shots are still inconsistent despite our best efforts:

The clouds have a pink tint 

The clouds have a yellow tint

If I had more time to finish our project, I would fix these discrepancies in grading because it means that our sequence is not continuous. I knew that shooting outdoors would pose issues with lighting and sound but I underestimated how hard it would be to edit them to appear the same. In hindsight, I would have started grading our shots as soon as possible to be the exact same so as to avoid this problem.

Despite this, our target audience did not pick up on the grading like I thought they would. This was probably due to the fact that I was so exposed to our work and in retrospect, the grading is only noticeable if somebody purposefully looks out for it. Our TA has positive feedback after watching the clip and commented that the events flowed better than it did in our rough cut which was probably due to the team using the previous feedback and more continuity techniques to make the scenes continuous.