Film Post Mortem

I handed my short film assignment in and what a mission it was! I am not so strong at editing and I have pretty much never colour graded film footage in my entire life! To top it off, it has been two years since I have used Pro Tools for sound.

I managed to attend one and a bit DaVinci tutorial classes. I did not find the software difficult to use at all, I did however, find the actual colour grading difficult. A lot of the time I doubted whether all the shots matched in colour within the same scene. I found that even having a break from the screen and looking at something else did not help me much. Instead, I would get one of my class mates to look at it and give me advice on it. I think I need much more practice with colour grading but I do not think I did too bad at it in the end.

I also need much more practice with editing although I did learn a few things along the way. I learned that having somebody on continuity is a brilliant idea. This ensures that the actor moves and says things in the same direction or manner throughout each shot of the same scene which makes it easier to put the shots together. I had a few issues trying to put shots together because the movement from my actor was different or they had a hand under their chin in the close up but not in the wide shot so things just did not match. I also learned that cutting shots on movement made the scene look seamless as long as the two shots were cut together at the right place. I realised once I got into the edit that I needed a few more ahots than I had but unfortunately, I was not in a position to go and film some pick ups. This meant I had to put my scenes together with the shots I had, which was challenging to say the least!

Some of the sound recorded for my film was not ideal at all. Unfortunately, I was almost completely missing my sound for an entire scene and some of it was a little quiet. I decided to leave my sound edit until last which became a disadvantage because when I tried to import my OMF sound file, Pro Tools would not bring it in properly so all of my sound clips showed up in the right place but without any waveforms meaning my aound clips were empty. It did not seem to make a difference no matter what options I changed every time I imported the sound files into Pro Tools. I spent a number of hours trying to get Pro Tools to work but in the end I had no choice but to render my final film out with the raw sound on it. Some of the sound was so loud it pierced your ears when listening to it and then there was sound that was at the opposite end of the scale that was almost non existent. This was most disappointing for me.

Even though the sound is not great, I still plan to edit it until I am happy with it. I enjoyed the whole process of making my short film from script to screen and I have learned a lot along the way. There are possibly a few other tweaks that I could make to my short film but I will look at that when I edit the sound. As the academic year comes to an end, I guess it is time to look towards my future prospects and decide which direction I want to take my career in!