Tag Archives: colour

Action in the editing suites

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Oh la la. Ready for action.
Before the tute on Tuesday, Ian and I organised our project. We named all the shots, made bins and sequences for the different scenes, made bins for the sound effects and the foley, etc.
Next time i’m in the suites I’m going to take a picture of it. My mum will never believe I created a system that organised.

Oh and BY THE WAY! It was Norway day yesterday! Here’s some pictures

Happy Norway day, juhuuu!

CONT’D
So when Sunniva, Ian and Ed sat down in the editing suites to pimp up our movie, everything was laid out perfectly. While Ed did some radiostuff Ian and I edited the sequences separately. We decided to give the nested sequences a go, and for a while it looked like it would work; it is clean and easy. It was good to look at every single sequence separately, finding the pace and the right length, and this part of the editing was indeed very clever. I feel like each individual scene has more to give now then when I smashed everything together in the rough cut.

However, when we put it all into the nested sequence it became messy. Yeah sure, it looks like a control freak has gone all in and left no room for mess and loose bits, but unfortunately my head isn’t put together that way. In the end we copied all the different shots in a sequence, and pasted it in a master sequence (so not the whole sequence as one chunk, but all the small bits). It is harder to edit this way because you have to keep all the small bits in mind when you move things around, but that’s the way I have to do it.

When we had structured it the way we wanted, we decided to add the voiceover. Ed, our scriptwriter, was in charge of placing the voiceover in the right spots; after trying out different approaches we settled on something all three were happy with.

For me it was important that not only did the voiceover sound good, but it also had to be paced right. If the pause was too short, it sounded rushed, and our assassin might appear nervous. If the pause was too long, the voiceover didn’t feel like a continuous piece; it becomes disturbing when it suddenly comes in after a long break of silence.

Ed made sure that the monologue matched the clips; for example, when Bryden says “It is possible to kill a man with bare hands”, you see “the marks” hands in a closeup, buttoning up his shirt. When he says “Hell, I’ve killed a man with a sharpened toothbrush”, the toothbrush is being placed in a cup.

When we were happy with the placement of the voiceover, we took on a most daunting task: Colour grading.

The amount of work I’ve done in this field so far has been minimal. I’m able to change the colours with the 3 point Colour Correction tool, but I rarely use it. I’ve also worked a little bit with Brightness and Contrast, but again, it is on very rare occasions.
However, in the lecture Paul showed some very useful tips on how to use Final Cut to its full (for second year students anyways) potential.

EIGHT POINT GARBAGE MATTE LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!
I feel invincible! I can conquer the world with this tool!

It was pretty awesome. BUT! It did become a bit more complicated when we added it to shots where the camera is moving. It feels a bit like you’re looking through a telescope; the edges are rounded, feathered (like your peripheral vision would be if you were looking through binoculars). It could work against or for our purpose. After all, our protagonist is being watched, so it could function as a subliminal message about this. However, it might also just look disturbing and weird..

As soon as we started working with the colour correction I fell into an editing coma; I just couldn’t stop. Seeing the extreme transformation on our film was breathtaking; I suddenly saw the shot I had visualised in my head when we made the storyboard (okay, this isn’t completely true. I saw the shot in Se7en, a film by David Fincher. My point is, it looked so much more like it now!)
Dark and menacing, just like our voiceover.

We lowered the saturation, made the black range even darker, the mid tones became darker as well, and in some instances we pumped the whites up a bit.
In the lecture Paul talked about shot matching, at this became essential here; one type of colour grading might look amazing on one shot, but it has to match the other shots we have.

It is a tedious process. I’m as patient as I am organized. The redering is probably going to make me crazy. Which might be exactly what I need to become a successful film maker; after all, they’re all a bit crazy.

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Ooops. Delayed again..

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EDITING! Yes! My second most favorite thing when it comes to making movies.

I love the fact that I can make our movie into 10 different movies in the editing suites. I could simply change the order, and the story would be completely different. In this film we are sticking with the script, but there are still a lot of playing to be done. Here’s the notes from this weeks lecture. I’ve got a million excuses for being late, but none that will be considered valid.

 

Audio and colour correction is definitely going to improve your film.

My boss at the local tv station in Norway went to sound school (directly translated from Norwegian. I know it probably has another name, but you get the idea), and although he started working with TV, audio has always been closest to his heart. “Good sound can fix bad footage, good footage can’t save bad audio” is something I’ve heard him say numerous times. And oh what a pain it was. I had to be extremely picky with everything I made, and he would always find something that wasn’t right, and I would have to fix it.

Such a pain. But what a valuable lesson! Now I’m starting to realise the importance, and I’m not looking forward to making the soundscape in our film; it’s going to be a big job.

A useful trick! Just as it is helpful to look at how the visual edit works by turning the sound of and just looking, try listening to your edit with eyes closed. I bet 50 dollars that you’ll hear “bad” sounds that you didn’t notice before.

Important to look at the film as it is shown infront of an audience. You get technically nervous, hyperconscious of everything.
Screening is a preview. Then go to the edit suites, recut it after getting comments, then try to submit it to a festival.

Reflection is key to your work, informing and improving your work as a filmmaker. 
Yihaa. I guess that is what I’m supposed to do now. I’ll do it soon. After I finished this. I promise.

Sound editing
Choose a scene:
- whose listening
- whose talking
- analyse the rhythm
- the space
- the pauses
- the talking over (interrupting)
- the atmos
- sound fx
- the music

AHA! Here’s a free layout on HOW to do a reflection. Gah we’re so spoiled.

Look at other work an see how the audio is put together.

Here’s something I didn’t know: If you want to elongate on time – don’t cut in action. A wide shot would take less time than a lof of close ups.

Complex sound scape that you don’t notice. Atmos, foley, cars, fridge noises.
Audio needs to peak at -6 to -10.
Use Audio Mixer in Final Cut to change the different sounds separately

freemusicarchive.org

Look at all your shots, and make sure they match. Of course, light changes from different location, but unless it is the purpose of the film, you don’t want the light and the colours to change dramatically.

Second level is make the image more punchy, larger than life, filmic, less video.

Yes. Yep. Ja. Jepp. That’s exactly what our film has been missing. It is a cool story, well shot and well lit, but it is very.. normal. If we want the footage to match the dark, dramatic story, we have to do some changes.

Many ways to do this: blacken the blacks. Saturate the colours or de saturare. Make it cooler, warmer.

Do it in small bursts. Don’t spend too much time on it.
Set up a separate sequence.
Don’t apply to all till the end.
Paste attributes.

Use vignette to spot out actors? Contradicts the resistance of use of shallow depth of field
Eight Point Garbage Matte… Click on the points and drag them where you want them.

Copy clip that has the setttings you want. Then go into next sequence, mark the clips you want to ass the attributes to. Then go Edit, then Paste attributes, and choose the attributes you want.

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Vittorio Storaro

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I love that part of our course is to learn about things via watching movies; for me it is such a good way, especially if the movie is put together in a good way. The other day I watched Visions of Light: The Art of Cinematography and Vittorio Storaro: Writing with Light in the library after class, and I found it both entertaining and educational.

While Visions had a huge variety of approaches to cinematography (and a timeline, showing new techniques that approached as time went by), Writing with Light showed the ideas of Vittorio Storaro, a cinematographer who has received three Oscars for his work, and is regarded as one of the best within that field.

What an adorable man. A little quirky, but it shines through that he simply loves what he’s doing. The way he talks about cinematography (well, to be fair, he doesn’t talk so much about the actual use of the camera, it is mainly all about lights) is quite fascinating; he talks about all these complicated and often highly experimental ways to use light in such a matter of fact sense, like it is something everybody should know. I think it was Francis Ford Coppola (it might also have been Bernardo Bertolucci, I’m not sure) who said that Storaro is just as crazy as everybody else who devotes their life to film; he lives in his own little universe, where lights are the most essential thing.

Colours are light waves, different colours are defined by the speed of the waves. I found it interesting how he uses colour to evoke emotion in the audience. This is his description of the colour spectrum (on one occasion, he refers to it differently every time).

Black is the unconscious, where everything starts

The first step is red, the colour of the blood

Orange is the colour of the family

Yellow is the colour of the consciousness

Green in the colour of knowing, or knowledge

Blue is the intelligence as a human being

Indigo is your prime material power

Violet is the last stage in life

And assume all of these colours is the last one, it is the white, which means balance, equilibrium

 

I think that I can highly benefit from learning more about light if I’m going to get better within cinematography. During our shoot I learned a lot, but there wasn’t much room for experimenting. We did use elements of red, to foreshadow  the blood that would come later in the film, but in a simple way; we added extra props that were red. Perhaps it is possible to play around with this a bit more in the edit..
I’ll give it a go next week.

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