Post Production

Post Production

For the first time this term, the production and post production stages were to overlay. This was not something we had anticipated or planned, but it actually ended up revealing quite a lot to us all about how we can individually manage our time to maximize productivity. At one point in our final week, three of us were on set filming our final interview, while the other two held the fort at the media lab and set to syncing footage from the previous days’ shoots.

Why none of us had never thought to work this way before is beyond me. I’m sure it has something to do with the fact that we all want to be involved with everything, and want every masterstroke to be a group decision. Thankfully this term, it wasn’t five of us huddled round one computer (I say five, and will continue to say five as a result of David being so scarcely present) overseeing everything. We trusted each other enough to be able to split up and work on different elements of post production individually. Or so we thought.

Syncing certainly isn’t the easiest thing to accomplish on Final Cut Studio as unless you’ve got a very defined marker in both your audio and video,  it has to be done by sight. But at this point in the year, I’d at least expect everyone in the group to recognize the paramount importance of compressing into Pro Res. This unfortunately was not the case with Josh, who we had assigned the task of compressing the Jacques interview footage and then syncing it, so that all we would have to do is import the compressed, synced footage onto our final timeline to begin the master edit. Where all of our other pieces of footage were imported and ready to go, when we imported the footage Josh had spent the best part of a day working on, we found it to be in  DV NTSC at 29 frames per second, and entirely out of sync. So much so, that we were left with soundless picture, and pictureless audio side by side each other. This of course, was not the end of the world, and easily rectified. I only wish that Josh had informed the group of his uncertainties earlier, rather than leading us to believe that he knew exactly what was expected of him. There was an initial frustration as we were ready to begin our master edit and then had to push it back a couple of hours, but it all worked out later that afternoon and we pressed on.

On this project, I personally found myself amazed by just how addicted you can become to editing. As with our shoots, we were not as strict with our structure as we have been on other projects. We knew the story we wanted to tell, and how we wanted our rich characters to come across. But as the majority of the interview footage was improvised, editing it together involved finding linking pieces of dialogue across the board, where the characters referenced certain events or characters, and then bouncing between the interviews creating a kind of comedy in the pace of the edit.

Where we had solid pieces of structured footage from our ‘archive’ shoots that involved specific gags or lines of dialogue, we looked through our interview footage and found responses that lent themselves directly to the ‘archive’ footage that we wanted to show. Once the interviews had been edited into place around the individual archive ‘set pieces’ we then set about bringing all of these archive set pieces together to produce one coherent, flowing film.

We were lucky that the majority of our interview footage required next to no additional colouring, although our interview with Mia was initially far too warm, with the actress appearing extremely orange. Through pulling all three colour wheels away from red/orange, slightly desaturating the whole clip, and upping the whites, we were able to achieve a more natural looking setting that slots in nicely with the other two interviews we did at Cinema City (Rubik and Jacques).

To create the look of the archive footage, we ended up being accidentally experimental, for some reason having TWO colour corrections applicable to the clip as well as a customized Bad TV filter that gave the impression that this footage had been recorded on an old VHS home movie camera. Our concern was always to make the footage look distinguishable, convincing and recognisibly continuous across the entire film. Luckily, this meant we really only had to paste the attributes from the first segment of archive footage that we edited. Some saturation issues had to be resolved, and this was due to the lighting varying between scenes, but all in all, we were all very satisfied with how our archive footage ended up keeping to our 70s motif, hopefully convincingly so.

We had a few sound issues later in our post-production week, only really with the interview footage. Rubik, Mia and Dan’s interviews were all spot on for the most part, but due to incorrect settings at the time of the audio recording, we found Jacques interview a struggle to edit. It was initially very quiet, and upon bringing the levels up and compressing it to get rid of the very bassy lower end frequencies, we found ourselved facing the prospect of a very echo-y, tinny sounding Jacques. This was eventually resolved on the final day of post by reimporting the source sound and starting from scratch. First, by eliminating all noise from the audio at its original volume, and then simply raising the volume slightly until it was on par with the rest of the interviews.

The final day morning before hand in had been set aside for final tweaks, assuming that two days away from the film and fresh ears and eyes would reveal any last minute corrections we wanted to make. This was a massive mistake, and thank god we exported a version on Friday as if we had not, we would not be handing in on time. Through the movement of scratch mac files from computer to computer and the reconnection and rerendering of footage, not only was audio forced out of sync, but video filters were altered in such a confusing way that I would have never been able to back track far enough to eliminate the destructive changes that took place.

Thankfully, Phil on hand to help put everything right. As the video from Friday’s export was exactly as wanted, and the audio from Mondays tweaks included the slight changes that were wanted, it was a ‘simple’ case of exporting the audio from Monday’s edit to match the video from Friday’s export. And the film was finished and finally ready for submission. A long haul and extremely stressful, but easily the most fun I’ve had making a film, the most educational production, and in the end, a piece that I personally am extremely proud of.