The final Production ~ Luke Leadbetter

Here is our final production all done and dusted! (Ater 5 hours of uploading to YouTube!)

Sound Effects ~ William Dixon

For the end of our Music Video, we had a scene where it was morning and it was the character waking up from his "dream". To create a better atmosphere I thought I'd add some sound effects. In the summer, I did work experience in London with a professional sound company, and one of the tips a sound effects editor told me is, "add lots of layered sounds, the more sounds, the more of story you create". So for my "story" I wanted to create the idea of there was a city outside. So I added in GarageBand the sound effect of cars driving by, a plan going overhead, police sirens and birds to give a fuller sound and to establish that it's morning. I then imported it into our Final Cut file and added the fade ins and fade outs relevant.

To play the sound effects, click play on the media player below:

Diary of Editing - Day 9 (Final) ~ William Dixon

Luke started editing early today, he started by adding the end sequence when it is morning and added the fade outs at the end. Earlier I created a sound effects audio file (see sound effects blog post for more details) me and Luke added that to the end to create the realisation of normality. We also added in the final stop motion clips. Once we were sure we finished, we watched through form beginning to end as many times as possible looking for any errors. We found one timing error and we opened up in Final Cut and edited that part to make it correct. After we exported it in a quicktime movie. We had finished.

Diary of editing - Day 8 ~ Luke Leadbetter

Today was to be frank, pretty awesome. Will and myself got a lot done during the lesson, and then also after school. During the lessonwe continued to insert clips and make subclips from the original sequences, and also finding new effects. We stumbled upon an effect called 'bloom', which really gives the disco lighting in the shots that bit more of a kick, and making the lights on the piano look really effective. At the end of the lesson, Will left with the promise of coming back. I continued to edit for an hour, filling in large gaps and creating some of the more complex scenes, such as a scene near the end where a spinning shot must be continually looped. When Will did, as by his word, return an hour later, we added cool looking effects and blurred the whole thing to soften the edges and remove some of the noise that came with filming with a not-so-great camera. We continued to power on through the editing, capturing, placing and editing clips for another two hours, until we were eventually thrown out at six 'o' clock by the caretaker. So overall a good time spent editing, with a lot done, hopefully we'll be done very soon!

Diary of Editing - Day 7 ~ William Dixon

Today we put the first two shots of the stop motion on. What we didn't realise was that the stop motion clips were not widescreen, but Jess managed to zoom in and that corrected it, but also it didn't ruin the shot. As it became clear that we didn't have much time left for filming brand new shots all the time, I decided to "reuse" some shots but in a way to fit the narrative. I repeated the clips but to the beat of the song so it created a loop effect, like DJ's use. With another shot, where the puppet turns towards the camera, I used an effect called flop which mirrors the shots. This created a turn around effect which when looped and in time with the music, looked very effective.

Editing Blog - Day 6 ~ Luke Leadbetter

Today Will decided to change the timings of a guitar strum sequence, this was quite time consuming due to the faffy nature of the clips. As well as this, we decided to recycle a couple of clips, for example, a shot of the puppet's hands changing fret on the guitar. For this shot however, we realised that if we reverse the timing, we could achieve what looked like a new shot, but without filming one.

Editing Blog - Day 5 ~ Luke Leadbetter

We have more footage! After 2 hours more filming on Sunday, we have some new shots!
So today we captured the new footage into Final Cut, cutting it and creating sub-clips as appropriate. Once this was done, I started to place the clips into the timeline, with advice and help from Will as to their timing and length. At the end of the lesson Will had to leave for another lesson, but luckily I had a free, leaving me for another hour to continue editing the lighting, position and timing. Will came back when he could, and we both agreed it was going well and what we would edit next lesson.

Editing Blog - Day 4 ~ Luke Leadbetter

Today we continued to edit the lighting, colour and timing of our captured shots. Through lots of tweaking I believe the overall quality of the shots are slowly improving. unfortunately, due to a lack of new footage, that was all we could manage for today, but we're all very happy with what we've accomplished so far.

Diary Of Editing - Day 3 ~ William Dixon

Yesterday we managed to get all the clips from our last filming on to Final Cut Express. During this time, we learned what clips we need to redo and what ones we can keep.
One of the shots we were worried about was when all the disco lights come on because we weren't sure it would look good on camera. Turns out that the shots looked great without any need of editing and we don't need to worry about adding any extra lighting. The only shots we didn't get done this day was the typing on the keyboard shots as we didn't have enough time to play around with the speeds of the shot, so we will continue to work on that during the next editing session.

Diary of Editing -Day 2 ~ William Dixon

This day, we cut up what we had filmed the day before into subclips. We also managed to get some of the clips into Final Cut and edit them up. During this we came across 2 problems. The first problem was that the tripod we used when filming was really unreliable. Basically, when we wanted to use it for panning, it was too loose to do a slow pan and when we tightened it, it was too stiff to do a smooth shot. So when it came to editing, most of the pan shots we couldn’t use because they were too wobbly. Second problem, was that we didn’t realise that when you add a new clip into Final Cut, it pushes all the other clips along, so all our synced clips so far had moved.

Although both the problems are annoying, we will take these as lessons. We now have devised a technique on adding the clips without pushing the clips. And also, we now know not the use that tripod in the filming as it’s unreliable.

Editing Diary - Day 2 ~ Luke Leadbetter

Today we continued editing from clips captured last lesson. Due to the fact we haven't had an opportunity to film since our last editing session, there was no new clips to insert. This gave myself and Will the opportunity to further fine tune the editing of our previously inserted clips. Next lesson we hope to have many more clips to insert so we can start filling in the gaps and adding more to the video.

Diary of Editing - Day 1 ~ Luke Leadbetter

Today Will and myself captured the clips from filming onto Final Cut Express. I then proceeded to cut the reel into seperate sub-clips, giving each appropriate names. This process was fiddly and irritating, trying to find the best take of a particular shot and then cutting it in the most suitable place. Once this had been accomplished, Will then changed the file type of the edited song (Due to Final Cut Expresses's inability to use M4A format) before placing it into Final Cut. I then positioned the clips into the timeline, applying suitable editing to the brightness and contrast of the clips, with feedback from Will. It was quite difficult to align the clips with song correctly, to create a smooth lip sync, but once this was accomplished the results were extremely satisfying. Through this section of the editing process we have realised that we need to re-do a few of the shots, and be much more aware of mise-en-scene and framing.