Construction post 8: My personal contribution to the edit sessions

During the edit sessions, I personally spent a lot of my free time in the edit suite to edit our sequence.

I recorded a few voiceovers with our main actor, Reuben, using a Blue Yeti Microphone and the software Audacity. After it was pointed out that the voiceover sounded muffled, I edited the audio to increase the output gain using 'equaliser' which made his voice clearer.

I used Livetype on the macbook to experiment with different title fonts and motions. I also taught Georgina how to use it as she had not used it before. However the titles that I made did not suit the visual footage and we decided it would be easier to make the titles on Adobe Premiere Pro because it was more convenient to place the titles and add motion to them. Originally, I had hoped to create titles that were similar to CAMP festival 2015 which had animated moths flying about the titles. After trying to create titles, I realised that with our limited time, skills and budget it was unrealistic that we could create titles with graphics like that.

I made a gif of the kind of title that I had in mind

I added transitions to our titles and a few shots in order to create a seamless flow instead of jumpy cuts. I used the film dissolve to create an illusion of time passing in the jetty scene.

During the edit sessions, we tested different grading techniques and experimented with saturation, brightness and contrast. A particular shot that I worked on was the shot of Craig sitting down to eat cereal. The lighting in the two shots meant that one shot was very saturated and looked very yellow in comparison to the other. I spent a lot of time using 'ProcAmp' and 'Three Way Color Corrector' to try to match the table cloth and bowl in both shots. In the end I got the two shots to match as best as I could by adding a blue hue to one and a yellow/orange to the other. As you can see below, the two are not perfectly matching and Reuben's jumper appears more purple in the first shot.

The editing process was very time consuming and required a sharp eye to spot small problems in grading. I think that I did the best that I could in the time that we were given.