(in, out, in, out, shake it all about - for those unfamiliar with the childrens song)
The past month or so has been devoted to the Fiction graduation film. It’s been a bit of a journey, and our final structure is borne of the knowledge that we’ve tried just about all reasonable alternatives in-keeping with the genre. We’re at the stage now where if someone suggests something different to the version they’re seeing, I can just grab it from another sequence and demonstrate why it was rejected.
However, the fact that we’ve arrived at something which bears a strong resemblence to the first cut (barring two scenes swapped and others shortened or deleted) may have been a product of not trimming the scenes down at an earlier stage, to work with their position at the time - which would have made it easier to isolate the reasons why certain themes weren’t working so well rather than leading us around a mad semi-fantasy world in which half of the virgin audience thought that our main character was mad (we’re aiming for rom-com)! Not that that didn’t have its value of course - we determined the precise value of the dream section and returned it to its original form, cutting out all recurrences or flashbacks - even those originally scripted.
But whilst I thought I was going in and trimming as much as I could whilst we were still moving scenes around - thereby saving time because of not having to massively adjust scenes when we’d changed the order of events, I can see now just how much it held us back. In one sense.
In the other sense, we’re still on track to picture lock on the original schedule - and we almost certainly wouldn’t have arrived at the same film with the same confidence had we not gone through the stages that we did.
The documentary’s finally onto the post-editing stages (i.e. sound and colour). We ended up getting another editor who spoke Italian to do some work to finish it off, I think the final count was 10 or 11 weeks in the edit between everyone.
This is one of the later stages, complete with temporary subtitles. The main video (and associated audio) is mostly coloured by character or location, which helped to give a decent at-a-glance indication of how the overall structure was looking without having to go through scene by scene every time we moved something.
Doc edit in AXP
Meanwhile, the animation’s been moving… well, as quickly as these things do, I guess. Most of the significant line drawing’s almost complete (there are assistants to do intermediate steps, as well as colouring once a few frames have been done), and we’ve altered the timing of a few shots now where it seemed right in the animatic, but had to change slightly once motion was added. There’s more still to come, but it makes the most sense to just spend half an hour each day with the director and run through any queries and recent work - less frequently if there’s a lot of other stuff going on, but she’s the fastest WACOM user in the West! Since she’s working with stills for the filmed backgrounds, the best bet’s probably going to be to reimport the final film with the new timings, alter the HDCAM backgrounds to sync with the film, then re-export for the compositing stages.
A still from the NFTS short animation 'Cherry On The Cake'
I’ve also been learning a bit of DVD Studio Pro in my downtime, with a view to producing a proper showreel DVD with complete films within each type of thing that I’ve cut (documentary, animation, fiction, adverts, promos etc). I’d done some really basic stuff with it in the past, and I’m still going the long way around on some things I’m sure, but anything which allows this amount of control is worth it:
Preliminary thoughts on editing showreel layout in DVD Studio Pro
… yes, that IS a picture from Cherry in the background. It’s intentionally blurred, and makes an appearance in the film in a photo frame - the level of detail on that model was fantastic.
Time to clear some of the 50+ hours of documentary rushes from my hard drives to make way for the fiction. After that is a sketch show (post planned for October/November), then it’s just supervising post on the films I’ve done and out into the ‘real’ world. Easy.
… as copied from a printout on the wall at the place where I digitise. Origin unknown. Argue on the precise ordering/ repetition amongst yourselves.
Optimism - “This could be really good.”
Confidence - “This is great!”
Doubt - “This is what they want, right?”
Resolve - “Fuck ‘em! We can do this!”
Despair - “Fuck, we can’t do this!”
Siege Mentality - “Fuck everyone, what the fuck do they know?”
Insane Euphoria - “Hahahahahaha! Who gives a fuck? Let’s edit with our toes like Daniel Day Lewis in My Left Foot. Let’s voice it ourselves. On helium. Let’s fashion part three from brie or jam or Old Spice or bits of dog.”
Today another editor on my course came into my room sounding rather excited about Microsoft’s latest announcement for user interfacing - the Windows 7 multi-touch:
This of course is a subject we’ve all discussed before - what if editing could have the user interface of Minority Report?
In the film, Tom Cruise reviews video footage of a crime (that has yet to happen, but that’s irrelevant here) and utilises all manner of time-lapse, zoom and selection tools via a pair of gloves and a projector.
The potential has always been obvious - mapping functions on an editing system to certain gestures (in the same way they can be mapped to buttons on the shuttlepro) to start with, with more specialist applications being developed to relate those gestures to certain areas of the screen/room or depending on the toolset you’d like to access at the time…. but with the wii remote and now the promised multi-touch mapping to multiple features and becoming a part of regular useage, the future seems to look bright. We’re getting there. Now just to combine them and not actually need a physical connection to input data.
Another ‘future’ development that came to my attention recently was in the 20th June issue of Broadcast - the UK TV trade paper. Within a more general section hypothesising the technology available in 2012 (with a fair number of mentions given to stereoscopic techniques, also known as 3D and previously discussed in this blog), there was a mention of the implications for post-production involved in tapeless filming. If rushes/ dailies are recorded straight to a disc, could that disc be part of a network which also includes an edit suite? How soon could editing theoretically begin after filming starts? And if an editor is on set/ receiving footage in real-time even in a remote location, how would that alter their role - as well as that of the director and cinematographer?
As a recent entrant to the post-production business, it’s easy for me to think of the current processes as how they’ve always been. My technological progression has more or less been from Premiere to various versions of Final Cut and Avid. As part of the Editing MA at the NFTS we do two excercises on Steenbecks with 16mm film, and I have a vague recollection of witnessing linear editing at Oxford Road in Manchester during some BBC outreach programme I participated in during my school years. Unless an article or book is specifically referring to the physical techniques involved, the view seems to be that the editor’s role and input has stayed largely the same over the conversion to digital even if the techniques have changed. But as I prepare to start my professional career (with any luck) with the tools that I think will see me through for the time being at least, I do wonder how different the job will look and be in 40 years’ time.
Playing around with Wordle, I entered in the text from my ‘about’ sections here and on my website as well as my CV…. and generated the above. It’s interesting to see without the surrounding context - some things are titles or synopses of projects, some things are background information which aren’t so relevant to what I do now, seperate words are broken up… but I suppose it’s fairly similar to how a computer would see the site, and also shows the emphasis (however unintentional) on certain words.
It’s fairly elementary, but the Doctor Who Confidential (BBC iPlayer - I believe only accessible from the UK) from last week has quite a nice insight to sound post-production processes for the uninitiated. Sound is always something I feel I’m lacking in - either I put off laying temp tracks etc for longer than I should within the editing process, or I just play around for ages with controls without any real sense of what I’m doing when I try to achieve a certain technical effect. Foley recording, however, I love. Take that as you will…. it seems fairly counter-intuitive for an editor, but the rhythms and the precise timbres of sounds synched to a video just appeals to a certain side of me which I guess I usually use in dialogue scenes more than anything, but comes from my musical and orchestral past.
Also, I’m considering my next phone. I think I’ll need email and internet, and I’m torn between the iPhone, a Blackberry, or a Nokia (E90) Communicator.It’s a few months away, but I’m currently swaying towards the Nokia, unless anyone has any insights?
