Major Project: Reflecting on footage and creating a rough cut

What this consisted of;

So, straight after filming my shoot, there was a 2 week gap in between my wrap time and being on camera for Rosie's shoot. I was very nervous to look through my footage straight after shooting for some reason and now I kind of wish I did it sooner. Maybe that comes down to the fact I am a very harsh critic when it comes to my own work but that being said, I think it is important to pay close attention to every detail. However, I wish I did this on the actual shoot days when I was directing.

The first initial days of creating a rough cut required me to scan through the clips and get a general Idea of what clips can work. I also scanned through the audio, renaming the major audio tracks that I knew I would be using. This will make it easier to find in the edit. 

The rough cut stage required me to piece together the different sections to see how well they will fit together. This proposed a few problems because I had not finished shooting and therefore I was missing some of the major scenes such as the actual beginning and ending scene. Since it is a rough cut, I will still put together what I can and try to make something that I can still show to Simon.

What went well

• Whilst going through the footage, there were shots which really fit with my vision and almost identical to my story boards so I was really proud of that. (example below)

               


Throughout this entire process I realised the importance of vision and understanding how good it is to know exactly what you want. Its about communicating that though, thats the important thing too so I was happy that I could visually get my ideas out and communicate this with my Camera Op.

• When piecing together the rough cut, I found it was actually really easy putting together the shots and thats because I gave myself options when shooting. By having a variety of shots like Wide to Med to MCU. Using this as the basis for my shots really benefited the edit so I will continue to implement this into my other projects. 

What didn't go so well

• Even though me and the camera operator where on the same page for most of the time, it is clear that we both have different styles in shooting. There are just some things you don't notice until the edit and due to my picky nature, I became quite disappointed in the edit. For example, my style of shooting is that if the camera is on the track and dolly performing a simple 'track in' or 'track out' movement, the rest of the tripod should be locked off so that no tilting or panning can occur. In my opinion that can take away from what you're trying to focus on and it looks very amateur. (example below)

As you can see, the camera was not locked off and it was moving from side to side and up and down whilst moving forward... At this point the F n V monitor's batteries had died and I couldn't see the screen but I was trusting my camera operator to get these very simple moves. We only had time to do it once because of how behind schedule I was so I had to move on after this. I wasn't able to use that shot and I wasn't able to use a variety of other shots for that very same reason. The process of editing this film became a very daunting one because its only in the edit stage do you realise all the little things that went wrong. I personally feel as though it isn't a minor thing because when you're paying someone to actually do a job, amateur mistakes like that shouldn't be happening, especially when they are experienced. I felt as though my edit now suffered because I couldn't use the shots I really wanted and no one else seemed to understand what I was seeing which was a little frustrating too.

• Another major annoyance was the fact that I fully realised how bad the sound was for the art corridor scene. Some of the takes where actually unusable. And so in the edit I was left with using the only useable track of audio which was the radio mic. The issue with the radio mic is that it was evident that the gain was too high when attached on Moses. So at some points, his audio was actually peaking when he was talking normally.Theres actually not a lot you can do when this happens so I already knew I would have to dub this audio over. but, for the sake of the rough cut, I decided to leave it as is and then correct it during the fine cut process.

• I also realised that for quite a few scenes of the montage (day 3) There was literally no sound recorded. I am unsure whether it was my fault for not remembering to tell the sound operator to record (a lot of the montage parts didn't need sound) but for two of the main scenes where they find out they get into the exhibition as well as when Isaiah confesses that he doesn't think he can do it, there is no recorded sound. I now knew I would have to get both actors together to dub over this because re shooting wasn't an option in that location. 

Overall experience

So after identifying the issues as I went along and created a rough cut, I realised there were lots of things I did not like about the film so far and I knew I would really have to schedule a re shoot to fill in all the gaps. At this point, my morale was really low because I felt like the efforts I went through wasn't quite translating on the screen but I still had time to fix it.

Next steps;

• To schedule a re shoot and fill in all the gaps
• try to find a day where you can re-record the missing sound