Life's Too Short - Editing Process

After much collaboration, we have decided to name our documentary 'Life's Too Short' after one of Vanessa's original songs due to it's overall contribution during the film, and its powerful content.

The editing process for this film has been very rushed due to the deadline we are working on and so for the past few days we have been in the edit suites for 12 hours a day, however we have made huge progress and have completed the final cut just 3 days from starting. Although it isn't exactly how we would like the documentary to be, due to our circumstances and issues we've had, we are all very proud of it and hope others think it is an entertaining piece of film.

The Process

 

As soon as we came back from Liverpool on the Saturday, I began to get to work on capturing, transferring and sub clipping everything ready for my collaboration with Chris the following day on what we have, what we may need and if we can make a decent documentary in time for the deadline.

The Sound

Right from the off, we unfortunately had a big issue (as can be expected with our track record) as when transferring the sound off the marantz to a hard drive, I discovered that the whole interview had been recorded in mono but as an mp3 file. This meant the quality of the recordings was substandard and even very hard to understand at points, therefore unusable. To get around this issue I decided we would use the sound from the camera and use effects such as Dynamic Compressor to get the levels of the voice up whilst reducing the background noise as much as possible. The background noise was an issue and makes the whole film quite loud, but by putting in a generally louder than usual atmos, it becomes a lot less noticeable throughout.

 

 

Regarding the sound, I split up the whole of the interview to the individual answers and began using the compressor on them to get the levels up over that of all the different atmos tracks. Then, after the rough cut was done on final cut (which I will go into later) I began to put individual answers into corresponding sequences to the video and start a rough assembly with that. When the fine cut was done I rearranged certain answers, added more in and began putting in a mixture of atmos' and recordings from Vanessa's performances. I had to go a lot of key framing with the sound here as there are points where the answers stop and just the performance is wanted to be heard. Also I used various cut away's, L and J cuts in the fine edit which had to be mirrored by slowly fading in different atmos' and performances.

 

 

Overall, I am happy that the way the sound turned out based on the fact we only use the camera sound which was very cluttered and hard to hear at many points, however, if the marantz recordings would have worked, the whole soundtrack would be a lot easier to listen to, the atmosphere tracks would have been easier to distinguish and have more range to them, and we could have played around with a few more effects and programs to add mood through the use of set recordings along with foley sounds.

The Edit

Because of all the preliminary research and planning we did for this shoot, we had already strung together a general sequence for the film before we even set off for Liverpool, due to the structure of the questions, so building an assembly for this idea was very easy and took almost no time at all. I did however bring up points about potentially changing around certain questions due to the answers given to us by Vanessa, in note form, which I then passed on to Chris and we all reviewed them and agreed that some changes would have to be made. After applying these changes, we started off with a rough cut which took some time. In this we tried to carefully position establishing shots in between certain breaks in dialogue, sequences and even to make two adjoining questions link together, without to use of a jump cut. Even though this process took a while, we did have enough footage to fill out these spaces along with the clips of her performing and it made the whole film flow a bit smoother without any awkward pauses, jumping between shots or breaks in the timeline.

 

 

I also applied various effects to the footage in the final cut to make it more entertaining and pleasing to watch. The main thing I used was colour correction. This was big part of our project due to the weather and lighting we shot the majority of our footage in, as it was raining and quite overcast all day, the colour correction allowed is to increase certain parts of the exposure (mids/whites/darks) and also to increase the saturation and overall colour of the individual shots. Although this took time, it vastly increased the quality of the majority of our shots and also allowed is to create a clear and heavy mood by using desaturation on certain shots and bringing out their darks, to create a reflective and sober mood that I think worked quite well.

 

 

Finally, also due to the exposure on a few of our shots, I used the image shape and image mask effects in conjunction with feather image and by multi-layering certain partially underexposed shots and increasing the brightness (through colour correction) on those certain areas. This improved a lot of interview shots where the back drop was too bright compared to the subject in the centre of the frame which made the shot quite uncomfortable to view, but with these combine effects, we were able to improve them a lot.

 

All in all I am happy the way the project ultimately turned out, however there are many different things that we could have improved on, the post-production side of things when as well as they could have done and gave us a pleasing final product.

Documentary in Liverpool : Take 2!

We have fortunately been granted an extension on our documentary until next Thursday which will allow us to do a re-shoot and save our documentary from total disaster. As many of the performers we interviewed last time are very busy and have a number of gigs and other things going on in their lives, we have only been able to arrange to meet with one, Vanessa Murry, which means we will be altering our original pitch idea quite considerably, and a unanimous decision was made, that we will focus the whole documentary on the life and story of Vanessa Murray's passion with music and the career she is building for herself in it.

 

The email that was sent to re-establish contact with our interviewees

The Treatment
Our 5 minute documentary will be on the life and story of Vanessa Murray, who is a young, aspiring musician in Liverpool, and her slow rising into the Liverpool music scene. We will be focusing on her past and how she fell in love with music, as well as how and what she is currently doing to live her dream and fulfil her passion to be a professional musician. We will also reference past achievements, her opinions on her career in relation to the city itself, and the pubic/worlds opinion on it as a way of life.
We will be doing this by doing an extensive interview with her asking her pre planned questions which will hopefully allow her to open up and give a passionate, honest, and interesting response to each of them and we will also inviting her to give us a few live performances of original songs that she has written and performed herself before to many people, and get the background on the making of them.
The purpose of this documentary is to investigate and observe Vanessa's life and what she puts in and has put in to building her career as a young musician in Liverpool.

Plan of Action
As we would only realistically have one day to shoot and save our project we all planned like mad and really drew out as much as we could from lessons learnt last time (checking equipment first and always having spares) as well as are previous knowledge of Liverpool from our last shoot there. The first problem we arrived at was the weather. Due to availability of kit and the lifestyles of the crew and contributors, we could only go and shoot on the Saturday, and it was scheduled for showers and grey cloud all day. This is very problematic for the Z1 as it struggles in low light and can give dull colours if the framing isn't right in terms of lighting so we decided it would be best to book out a DSLR and Z1 together, so we could see which one worked best on location. Unfortunately, we couldn't book out a DSLR due to it not being available from stores at our requested time so we had to stick to the Z1. To negate the negatives as much as possible, we decided to familiarise ourselves with the gain function on the Z1, as well as paying close attention to zebras and IRIS levels throughout our shoot. We also adapted to the weather by bringing an umbrella and plastic bags to keep the camera dry and make shots as clear as possible.

That being said, we had no further issues with booking out kit or preparing for the shoot. We also had written ourselves guidelines, a list of shots we wanted to capture and a thorough set of questions to make sure we did everything right this time.

Even though the shot list is quite vague as you can see (above) in terms of structure and order, there is a lot of different ideas and key locations which we agreed to film at various different angles and in various different compositions to get a core of establishing shots that we could cut away to in the film if the content we got from the interview wasn't substantial enough.

 

The set of questions we asked Vanessa.

We all designed these questions to get Vanessa to elaborate as much as possible and give us very deep and interesting answers which would make an entertaining documentary to watch and our thought process was the the more questions we asked, the more usable answers we would get. In hindsight, we should have given the questions a better and more careful order, and built on certain sections a bit more to really squeeze any information or memories out of Vanessa as possible.

We once again transcribed as much as possible on the train journey home to cut out some time we would normally do it in later and also to make sure we had got enough content to use along side the establishing shots and previous footage.

All in all and despite the horrible weather, we had a very good day re-shooting the documentary and got 56 minutes of tape filled up with a 30 minute interview so we are feeling very confident that we have to content available, now its down to me (as the editor) to get cracking on and start to put together the film.

Further Documentary Issues

Along with the previous issues we've had as a group regarding the whole documentary, we have now had another massive set back as my hard drive which contained all the editing done over the past few days along with the raw footage and sound, has broken meaning we've lost pretty much everything. We still have most of the raw footage on tapes and SD cards, however we have no sound to go with it which of course is a huge issue. We've been in contact with Dom and Debbie and told them our current situation after a meeting they have been kind enough to grant us an extension to our project of a week.
We are currently re-scheduling a return visit to Liverpool to obtain as much of the old footage as possible and potentially re-shoot interviews, establisher's and record as much sound as possible, but due to the lives and nature of the street performers we originally interviewed, it may be very difficult to get the exact same content as we did previously and because of this we are, as a group, discussing potential idea's and back up plans to implement if necessary.
From this experience we have learnt to always back up your edit every time it is worked upon, or at the very least keep the raw footage and sound backed up on one or more different hard drives. We will hopefully be able to adapt the best we can given our current situation and still be able to produce a solid documentary in the time we have been given.