Construction Post 6: Reflections on Edit Week 2

Schedule for Edit Week 2:

EGA - group meeting

E - Ela

G - Gift

A - Amber

Our second week of editing has been more useful in developing our project as we have added titles, and made sure that the soundtrack and sound effects are at the correct timings. We also created a voiceover of one of our actors as the role of Arthur's mother (in opening shot). Using the microphone and headphones, we recorded this dialogue from behind a closed door to give the effect of his mother shouting to him from downstairs. This is much more successful than the voiceover that we recorded for the rough cut, as it is much more realistic and appears to come from further away.

After completing the cut, we altered the music and sound effects so that they would match the action in each shot. We also included transitions to make the sequence more effective and realistic.

As we had completed our cut, the next stage was grading, in which we altered the brightness, contrast and saturation of the footage to give the intended effect of the genre. Below shows the grading process, including the three-way colour corrector which allowed us to fix any issues with colour (for example, we removed yellow and blue tints from the corridor shots, and we made the shots in the house more saturated). This tutorial assisted us in navigating the colour corrector on Premiere Pro and how to use it. The lower image below demonstrates how we were able to shift the colour away from other colour tints which were not effective for the particular shot.

For titles, we chose the font 'Brain Flower' as it matched our style of film and was effective in connoting the teen comedy genre. (It is similar to the informal font used in "Juno")

Reflections: Overall this week was more productive than last week, as we knew the changes we planned to make once we had completed cutting the shots. The grading process was the most challenging because our shots varied in terms of the lighting and contrast, however our project has developed significantly as the changes we made to the grading clearly connote the teen film genre. We managed to find extra time before and after school in order to complete the editing process which was useful in evaluating our decisions about titles and grading. However, to improve our final outcome we could have added the voiceovers before Edit Week 2, which would have saved time for other priorities such as grading.

Amber, Gift and I grading the final scenes