Collaborating with Sound Designer

Working with the sound designer is something I always try and do, especially in small production crews like ours, so there is no confusion between us that will enable the whole of the post-prodcution process to go smoothly. Luke, the sound designer/recorder, and myself have worked on a number of projects together so we are on the same wavelength when it comes to understanding each other's workflow. I synced all the recorded sound with the shots that we used in the fine cut stage so he wouldn't have to waste time syncing them himself. However, due to us making a number of changes before fully picture locking, I also compiled a short list of the takes we used and when in a few scenes that contained a lot of dialogue to help speed up any re-syncing he needed to do.

Brief sound notes on the headmaster scene.

Sync sound takes from the start of the film.

The best way I could help Luke was to get the picture locked and finish the visuals. “Picture lock is important because it lets the sound editors and the composer know there won’t be any further changes to the length of the film.” [1; Pg 306] As soon as this was done I exported the cut and gave it to him so he could re sync anything that needed to be done as well as cleaning up the dialogue if necessary.

The director and I sat with him through the first few sound edits so we could discuss any non-diegetic sound that we thought could be used to match a specific shot. I also sat in to justify why I had used certain shots that I thought could be enhanced by creative implementation of sound over others. For example, the headmasters scene where a shot of Daniel fades into a slow motion shot of the kite flying through the air originally just had the headmasters dialogue underneath which didn't work on its own, but with the implementation of music and wind it really draws the audience into Daniels imagination.

Collaborating with sound designer.

Finally, Luke exported the sound cut at a number of different intervals to give back to me so I could export them with the visuals and send them to tutors to get feedback at every step of the way. This also allowed us to attend almost all the DCP tech rehearsals at both the Void and The Showroom so we could listen to the sound on better speakers.

Bibliography

1. Pete Shaner (2011); Digital Filmmaking: An Introduction; Virginia: Mercury Learning and Information

Daniel's Kite - Fine Cut Part 2

After I finished completing the changes brought to our attention in the previous screening of our film, my goal was to get it to picture lock so the sound designer wouldn’t have to worry about re-syncing sound constantly. I thought the best way to get to this stage would be to get some final feedback from peers and tutors so I exported the cut again to allow them to view it.

Written feedback received from Chris Cooke

Transcribed verbal feedback from Chris Hall

After receiving this feedback, I met with the director, Chris Kenward, to discuss it and try and implement some of the changes to see if we felt it worked or not. This was the stage where I collaborated with the director the most, as I previously did the majority of the edit on my own (minus the work on the headmasters scene) but at this late stage I felt it was important to get a second opinion on every single change that I had made over the whole process. I did this because the film is ultimately the director’s vision and should reflect that. “V: What is the editor’s job? W: I see the job as trying to get the best possible version of the film that the director wants. You always have to keep in the forefront of your mind that it is the director’s film.”^{[1; Pg 15]} I was mindful of this throughout the editing process by showing Chris the various cuts before anyone else to make sure he was happy with what I had done.

To begin with we went through the feedback Chris Hall gave us, as it was mainly to do with the actual cutting of scenes, pace of the film or sound design.

Implementing changes: Compositing parents out of background, before.

Implementing changes: Using the picture in picture effect to cut them out.

Implementing changes: Cutting out jarring close ups and replacing them with wides.

Implementing changes: Cutting 2nd shot in the film out completely.

After we made each small change we would watch through the whole scene, making sure it didn’t effect the pace or clarity of the narrative. The director and I tend to agree on most things due to our length of time working with each other so we were used to this process at the end of post-production, making it relatively smooth.

During this last fine-tuning process, I had to be as objective yet critical as possible to ensure the film still made sense, was engaging and was ultimately what the director wanted. We did these last changes over the course of 5 days so we didn’t spend too long editing the film at one time, enabling us to keep a clear head when making any decisions. This quote from Walter Murch summed up this final week of changes for me: “Film editing means aiming at a moving target. A shot length that feels appropriate today might not seem that way later when adjacent scenes and sequences have been changed or reordered. Every edit decision, no matter how trivial it seems or how few frames it involves, throws a pebble into a placid pond. It ripples all the surrounding material. That’s why there is a constancy and perseverance to film editing – viewing, reviewing, and rethinking.”^{[2; Pg 208-209]}

Bibliography

1. Vincent LoBrutto (1991); Selected Takes: Film Editors on Editing; New York: Praeger Publishers
2. Charles Koppelman (2005); Behind the Seen: How Walter Murch edited Cold Mountain using Apple’s Final Cut Pro and what this means for cinema; US: New Riders

Daniels Kite - Fine Cut

As we had sorted out the narrative structure and most of the pacing issues in the rough cut, I focused mainly on cutting out unnecessary dialogue, exposition and shots in the fine cut stage, whilst also tightening the edit even more. Once again, I followed the tutor’s feedback to influence my decisions during the whole process, trying out what they had suggested as well as collaborating with the director to ensure the film didn’t alter from his idea too much.

Verbal feedback given during the rough cut screening.

The main feedback we received brought up the headmaster’s office scene as it was still too long which dragged down the pace of the whole film. The eyeline match was also very extreme, like we had originally planned it to be, but the general consensus was that it was too ambiguous and didn’t work which made the audience confused and disengaged with the scene. I was told to be ‘brutal’ when cutting this scene down as a lot of the dialogue wasn’t necessarily needed as it didn’t progress the narrative in any way. We were set a target of trimming it down to 45 seconds to keep the films pace snappy and engaging as well as not boring the audience with unnecessary exposition. The director, Chris Kenward, and I repeated the scene over and over, looking at the script for reference to see what lines we could cut with the monologue still making sense. This process involved cutting out around 2 minutes worth of dialogue with us constantly making sure we were giving the audience enough exposition for the rest of the narrative to make sense. “…if a film can provoke the audience’s participation-if the film gives a certain amount of information but requires the audience to complete the ideas, then it engages each member of the audience as a creative participant in the work.”^{[1; Pg 46]}

Cutting out big parts of the headmaster's dialogue.

After trying a few things and watching the scene back again and again, we made the dialogue work whilst also making the scene around 1 minute 30 seconds, down from 3 and half minutes.

Doing this created another issue with the scene as the dialogue was fairly chopped up which created quite a few jump cuts and gaps in the video. We originally intended to cover these gaps by cutting back to Daniel but because of the issue with the eyeline match we had to think of another way to solve the issue.

Trying out different techniques to cut out mismatched eyeline.

We couldn’t decide on a definitive solution so we kept the sequence in a rough cut stage until we could discuss it with our project tutor at a later date.

The other feedback featured similar changes we were advised to make in the assembly feedback, such as trying to centre all the scenes on Daniel more by giving him more coverage over the other actors. This was to cover up some of the others questionable performances but also to allow the audience to engage more with Daniel and understand some of his decisions. The main way I did this was to L or J cut other characters dialogue underneath shots of Daniel or even have them talking off screen and holding a shot of Daniel for longer. Tom Rolf, editor of Taxi Driver (1976) suggests against this, “… I never let an actor start his dialogue offstage. He should start onstage and the segue into whoever else is reacting to it… It feels like you’re trying to correct a mistake. It doesn’t look normal or real.”_{[2; Pg 126]} However I disagree here as I think this only applies when referring to an interaction between two characters that are equally important to the story. Our film is ultimately about the emotions of Daniel and how he sees the world, so his reaction and mood is what drives the narrative and allows the audience to keep engaged, meaning his face is the most important visual within the scene.

However, changing the dialogue in this way did slightly disrupt the pacing of some of the scenes, so in order to fix this I decided to cut out certain lines that impeded the pacing so the narrative would flow smoothly once again.

Cutting out lines of dialogue to aid scene's flow.

We did get questioned about one of the scenes, where Daniel escapes to the stop motion world from his bedroom the second time around, as the tutors felt it didn’t fit in with the rest of the film visually. We explained that it was intended to look like this as a visual metaphor of Daniel’s imagination being suppressed which the tutors understood, but they said it still felt a bit strange. To try and address this I altered the lighting on the green screen shots to make both the background and foreground match, whilst also cutting down the length of the scene so even if it remained jarring to the narrative, as is its purpose, it doesn’t pull the audience out of the narrative all together.

Trimming 2nd green-screen dream sequence.

The rest of the feedback mainly involved notes on the sound or the colour grade, which I will look at in detail in separate posts, so to finish the fine cut I simply started tightening the lengths of individual clips to make the flow of each scene as smooth as possible and, finally, put the credits on. 

Tightening length of individual shots to perfect pacing.

Adding titles.

After completing this cut I gave it to the sound designer Luke Finch so he can begin on the audio. I also uploaded it to Vimeo to show the tutors again, as well as the rest of our production crew, so they could review the visual cut before the sound went on so they could give me any feedback.

 
(Last accessed: 14/05/2015, 13:37)

Bibliography

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

2. Gabriella Oldham (1992); First Cut: Conversations with Film Editors; USA: University of California Press

Daniels Kite - Rough Cut

As I worked with the film quite heavily in the pre-production stage it was hard to keep an open mind when thinking of what to change and what to cut all together when progressing the edit, so I attempted to look at the film through fresh eyes. “As a film editor, you’re looking at the picture totally objectively, not subjectively, and you’re trying very hard to pretend you’re the audience so that if something is not working, you are the first one to know and can fix it.” ^{[1a; Pg 19]} To do this I watched the film back on a different computer in a different location to the one I normally edit on to try and distance myself from the background knowledge I had on the film. After I did this I made notes on what I thought didn’t make sense or what didn’t come across effectively which heavily mimicked the tutor’s feedback.

My main goal to progress Daniel's Kite from the assembly to rough cut stage involved looking carefully at the pacing of the narrative and if the audience would understand and engage with the themes we were trying to portray. To do this I mainly used tutors feedback to guide me in selecting the areas that didn’t work so I could look at them and figure out what was wrong.

Written feedback from Chris Cooke

The assembly cut was very bare and had a lot of key shots missing so it was very easy to start addressing the major issue of pacing by simply adding in the pick-up shots we had filmed. These contained a mix of stop motion sequences, dream sequences and general pick-ups that contained some key narrative points that weren’t present in the previous cut. This helped clear up a lot of the ambiguity surrounding the narrative and helped me address of the feedback straight away.

The stop motion was the biggest factor in filling the gaps in the narrative and worked very effectively at drawing the audience into the fantasy world that Daniel creates by allowing them to see it through his eyes. As two of the sequences weren’t originally stop motion in the script, I had to improvise with effects to make them still work with the narrative. In the script Daniel cannot tell if he sees his Dad or not in the first dream sequence, so I keyframed a green screen shot of him and his Dad using a blur effect to keep an enigma around the shot as we originally intended.

Using Avid's blur effect

Some of the feedback involved the cinematography and lighting which we couldn’t do anything about as reshoots were out of the question. However I did try and nullify these issues by using certain shots less frequently, or even cutting them out all together in certain scenes. In the living room scene for example, I cut out a lot of the close ups showing the dad and focused more on the wides and close ups of Daniel. This not only solved the problem of the composition, but also centred the scene more on Daniel whist building on the theme of distance between him and his dad.

Replacing shots with wides

Tightening the edit was another major task as it affected the flow and immersive nature of the narrative by being too slow and drawn out. I watched through each scene a number of times and trimmed each shot down to the optimal length, keeping in mind where the audience’s eye would be drawn to from one cut to the next. “After each cut it takes a few milliseconds for the audience to discover where they should now be looking. If you don’t carry their focus of interest across the cut points, if you make them search at every cut, they become disoriented and annoyed, without knowing why.” ^{[2; Pg 41]}

All of these changes help draw the audience’s attention away from the fact that they are watching a fantasy film and instead submerge them in the films narrative so they almost believe what they are seeing is real.“H: Editing I think is a part of the film you don’t see.”^{[1b; Pg 96]}

Here is the finished rough cut. (Last accessed: 14/05/2015, 13:37)

 Bibliography

1. Gabriella Oldham (1992); First Cut: Conversations with Film Editors; USA: University of California Press
           1a. Chapter 1: Being an Editor – Sheldon Kahn

           1b. Chapter 5: Flashback, Flashforward – Harold F. Kress and Carl Kress

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

Technical Report - Green Screen Sequences

The majority of the green screen sequences we filmed in the end were not originally in the script and  only got chosen after problems getting locations. I met with the director to discuss what we were going to do to replace the shots we couldn't get from the script and we decided to film 2 scenes just on green screen after coming up with the idea of the stop motion. I had already done research into green screen last semester so I was well prepared in dealing with the larger quantity of footage.

The first thing I did was create 2 video tracks and layer the green screen footage on the top track with the stop motion on the bottom.

Layering video tracks.

After doing this I applied the Spectrematte effect onto the top green screen layer and selected the colour that I wanted the Matte to apply to by dragging the select colour icon onto the green of the video.

Selecting the colour

This made the 1st video track visible but also created a slight green glow around Daniel. To negate this I altered the Matte Processing which eroded the edges around Daniel, smoothing out the green screen's "spill".

Smoothing out the edges around Daniel.

This did the job fairly effectively but to make sure it was completely negated and looked 'realistic' I altered the 'Inner Softness' which merged the background and foreground more.

Using inner softness to merge background with Daniel.

Finally I did some quick light matching to make turn down the brightness of the green screen shot to make it fit more easily with the lighting of the background.

Doing preliminary colour correction.

After completing both sequences I viewed the whole film again to make sure they fit in with the narrative and visual style and I believe they do. They also help build on the themes of childlike whimsy and imagination effectively and keep in line with the films fantasy nature.

Stop Motion Sequences

We originally intended the stop motion sequences to be done in collaboration with an animation student as not many of us had experience with the format; however he unfortunately dropped out late on so we had to complete it ourselves. As we knew we wouldn’t be able to replicate a professional piece of stop motion, we decided to go in the opposite direction and make it look more childlike and quirky. Chris and I chose to create cardboard cut-out backgrounds of the locations written in the script and started to animate them, using them in dream sequences where Daniel escapes reality through his imagination.

Lighting set and camera set up.

Framing of camera on card.

After taking 500+ pictures, I began importing them into Media Composer and labelling the beginning and end of each different background using colour markers.

I then changed the bin view that they were located in to Script View, which shows a thumbnail of the each clip, and highlighted all the pictures from the first background we wanted to animate.

I double clicked on the first clip, bringing all of the pictures into the source monitor where I pressed “4” on the keyboard followed by “o” to mark an outpoint on every clip.

I then dragged all the selected clips from the bin into the timeline so they were all one after the other.

As all these individual images are difficult to work with I compressed them into one clip by using Videomixdown on a selected part of the sequence.

This then compressed all the images together to make one easier to work with video track.

We’ve very happy with how the sequences have worked in our film by pushing the boundaries of reality into childlike wonder. The stop motion improves the theme of escapism and surrealism in the dream sequences as well as giving the feel good aspect of the film a boost.