Tuesday, 24 March 2015

Daniels Kite - Assembly

The main goal of an assembly is to create a sequence that can portray a films narrative so the audience has a clear understanding of what is going on. The first assembly normally never achieves this goal as it is also a time for experimentation and trying a different approach to the film that may differ from the shotlist. "What you really want to do when first assembling a film is to put it together, right from the beginning, without second-guessing anything. Don’t try and be too smart too early. When you’ve finally gotten it all assembled, you can see how far the film has strayed from its intended trajectory.”[1; Pg 37]

My ideal way of starting this process would involve getting all the rushes from the shot list onto Media Composer and start cutting together a sequence that I thought satisfied this goal. However, due to a number of uncontrollable circumstances such as working with child actors and their availability, this wasn't feasible and we filmed over a month instead of the designated 2 weeks.
After each shoot day backed up the footage on a separate hard drive and then transferred the rushes into Media Composer. As we filmed on the Sony F5 I had to download a plug in which allowed XAVC/XDCAM footage to be AMA-linked in Media Composer which I decided was a quicker workflow than using DaVinci Resolve to convert it.
Source: http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/pdzk-ma2
Using AMA-Link with the Sony XAVC/XDCAM plug in.
After AMA-linking the footage, I put it into bins organised by shoot day and then labelled the clip by its framing and the action within it e.g. MS Daniel glum. I also imported the sound from the same day ready for it to be synced.
Organising rushes by shoot date.
I synced the sound with the corresponding video clip, using the clapper board as a reference and then started putting the synced clips into new bins organised by scene.
Syncing sound using Inpoints.
Organising synced clips by scene number.
As we filmed in an non-chronological order I only had a small amount of footage from a mixture of scenes to work with at any given time so I began by cutting the scenes together from the rushes I did have day by day, leaving gaps in the timeline for any shots that we hadn’t filmed yet.
Early assembly created between shoot days.
I continued doing this during the gaps between shoot days so I could show the group how each scene looked and also so I could keep a record of what shots we still needed and what re-takes we would have to get.
(Last accessed: 14/05/2015, 13:37)
(Last accessed: 14/05/2015, 13:37)

Here is the final assembly so far which is still missing around 22 shots:
(Last accessed: 14/05/2015, 13:37)

The gaps in the timeline meant that the pacing of the film was very difficult to visualise so I focused entirely on the clarity of the narrative which was made relatively easy due to the quantity of good coverage in almost all the scenes. However there were some exceptions, more noticeably scene 9, where there was a lack of usable reaction shots of Daniel which I believe will cause some issues with the pacing of the scene in the rough cut as it is currently very slow due to the Headmasters performance.
Finally the sound is very sparse as I have only used sync sound in this assembly, so overlapping dialogue and any L or J cuts will be improved when I collaborate with the sound designer at a later date.

Biography

1. Michael Ondaatje (2002); The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film; London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

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