POST-PRODUCTION
I actually place this three-dimensional continuity at the bottom of a list of six criteria for what makes a good cut. At the top of the list is Emotion, the thing you come to last, if at all, at film school largely because it's the hardest thing to define and deal with. How do you want the audience to feel? If they are feeling what you want them to feel all the way through the film, you've done about as much as you can ever do. What they finally remember is not the editing, not the camerawork, not the performances, not even the story – it's how they felt.
(Walter Murch, In the Blink of an Eye)
UNCUT GEMS – THE ROUGH CUT AND SUBSEQUENT TALES
Before heading back home, I had a quick meeting with Peter North, regarding the editing process. Since our final filming date was two days before I was leaving Leeds, I would have literally no time to start on the project. After discussing it with him, we concluded that I should complete the project entirely in DaVinci Resolve, since Avid Media Composer was known for being temperamental, and my laptop could definitely not handle it very well. Patryk had set up a database on my external hard drive, so that I could actually transport the project back to the University and finish it on the School’s computers. We discussed the idea of me coming to Leeds for a few days during the break (since I was originally going to return post-deadline), and the group were all for it.
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When back home, I did not look at or think about the project until December 27th – I thought a break was well deserved, for all of us. Patryk asked me if I could get the rough cut to him by January 4th, so that we could send it to our music composer. It seemed absolutely fair, so when Christmas was over, I got to work.
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I began the process by looking up how to create proxy files in DaVinci; all of our footage was in 4K, and my laptop was struggling with even the most basic playback. After approximately four hours, I could actually watch back what we recorded, all whilst in Resolve. I initially marked the clips I found usable and ones that should be discarded with different colours, pink and navy blue respectively; later on, the colour olive meant that I was not sure, but perhaps a part of a clip could be of use.
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Then, I completed two shot logs – one for each location; usually, they would not be a part of my workflow, I tend to simply jump into something and see what works. However, in this instance, the documents were actually immensely helpful, and made me much more aware of the material I was working with (the consistent naming also helped with the audio syncing and adjustments later on).
DAY 1
DAY 2
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After laying down the voiceover groundwork, now with synchronised audio, it was time for the forest scenes. When the clapperboard was still being used in the woods, it was not reflective of either the gallery dialogue (in terms of shots going over the voiceover) or the script scene order. To make life easier for myself, I printed out the script and associated clip names with each particular scene; it worked wonders, and the process became much easier. In terms of woods audio, even though the Tentacle worked, DaVinci simply refused to link the footage to the correct clips – so I was left with the manual process of looking at the footage and audio timecodes and aligning them together in-timeline (which was tedious, but the gallery scenes were still far worse, so I am thankful for the Tentacle).
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On top of those various issues, I also stumbled upon a continuity error. Within the first forest scene, there was meant to be a jaws (dolly) shot; however, we recorded ours after Patryk’s character already had a black eye, thus completely ruining our initial plans. After some rearranging and consulting with Patryk, I managed to incorporate the shot into another part of the film, where it did actually work with the narrative. Perhaps not as well as intended, but in our eyes it was too good of a shot to waste.
SCRIPT!
I completed the rough cut on January 2nd, and uploaded it to YouTube for Patryk to see. He expressed enthusiasm for the ending (which was HEAVILY inspired by the ending of The Favorite), which I very much appreciated, and voiced his concerns to me (screenshots below). I then went back to the timeline to refine it and throughout the process, I was in close contact with Patryk, primarily so that I could receive instant feedback. That was perhaps one of the most difficult things about editing away from Leeds – Patryk was not there to oversee the process, thus leaving me to guess his vision completely.
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After some work with the shots (especially the dolly, and stitching two different ones together to achieve the best possible result), and fixing the audio so that it was not the one merged track (because that sounded absolutely revolting) but the tracks from separate microphones, the second rough cut was finished and sent to Patryk. He had minor concerns that were to be fixed when I was back in Leeds, and was happy enough with the product to send it to the composer. I turned off Resolve and did not open it up until December 11th – the day when Patryk and I were back together at last, doing work at the SMC.
THE COLOR OF MONEY – THE COLOUR GRADING
In the comfort of edit pod one, colour grading became something exciting, rather than something to fear. Some technical difficulties did occur, especially with the big monitor doing whatever it wanted to do, but with each colour graded shot the satisfaction surrounding the project increased exponentially. I was the person doing it, but Patryk was there for that instantaneous feedback that I missed so much when putting together the rough cut.
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On December 11th, after hours spent in the school, we had put together a base grade and basic colour adjustments. The biggest challenge turned out to be the gallery scenes, where inconsistent lighting and differences in skin tones made it nearly impossible to match shots correctly. As for the forest scenes, some were more difficult than others, especially since the time of day changed throughout the shoot, but the differences in particular tones was something I could not figure out beyond a certain point – and so we left it as it was.
December 12th was the day that the most exciting parts of adjustments happened. In the final shot, our lead smears red on his face – red which was barely visible with just the simple grade. Patryk suggested a mask, which I hesitantly agreed to. My enthusiasm increased when I started to figure out the tracking within Resolve. I began to manually adjust the masks over the desired areas, frame by frame.
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When I was almost done with the final area, something suddenly broke: masks were disappearing, and points were moving around. After a minor panic, and some emotional distress (after all, over two hours of work went to waste), Patryk decided it was time to do something else. We watched video on object removal (which we used to help us remove hooks from walls in the gallery scenes), and it highlighted something that saved my sanity – the fact that Resolve does, in fact, have automatic tracking (which I had no idea about when I spent hours adjusting masks frame by frame). Feeling more foolish than ever, I played around with it, and it ended up looking great, making it into the final film.
The manual tracking mask for the shot
On the same day, we played around with different filters and effects Resolve had to offer (maxing out the GPU of the edit pod at one point) and ended up finishing the grading process – thus leaving us with small final adjustments, and audio mixing.
“THESE GO TO ELEVEN” – THE AUDIO EDITING
On December 13th, Patryk and I went into the SMC for the final time. He was working on the titles, whilst I was figuring out the volume and mixing of dialogue. None of it ever peaked (even the scream that we recorded in the woods), which I was very proud of, but the background noise was inconsistent, just as I feared. I put down the wild-tracks for both the woods and the gallery, and applied an abysmal number of cross-fades on the spoken lines – which worked wonders for the shifts in background sound. I also played around with the noise reduction tool DaVinci had to offer, and got it to work relatively well on shots where a simple transition did not work.
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After the dialogue was sounding loud and clear, we moved on to music. Our composer’s girlfriend had torn a ligament in her knee, so he was with her, and therefore unable to complete the music track. We had the opening, but that was about it, as far as usable audio went. Patryk had previously completed an incredibly thorough music reference sheet, so he had an idea on what songs to include in the film instead of the composed track. He placed them into the timeline, some of them actually working incredibly well with the film’s pacing, and I applied the necessary transitions and adjustments. The music was an ideal way of masking the inconsistent background sound as well, which made us more than happy.
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After some final shot and audio adjustments, around 11:00 pm, we began exporting. To our terror, the edit pod we were working in (edit pod four, since one was occupied at the time of arrival) crashed approximately four times whilst trying to render the film. We were in a state of absolute panic, and I suggested we try to use edit pod one, one final time before we give up and miss the deadline. Thankfully, that worked – and thus, INLUSTRATIO was finally complete, 20 minutes before the deadline.
The final timeline for the project (with the media clock)