Editing "Coercion" (Narrative)

Editing Scene 4

I had it in my mind all along that I would edit scene 4 first so I had more time to get the kettle sequence as close to perfect as possible.

I was happy with all the different shots I got, and was more than happy with how well they cut together with each other. My however, that being said, nothing is perfect. Halfway through shooting the scene, there was a problem with the shotgun microphone which didn't become apparent until listening to audio later, and it caused the last few lines of dialogue to become very tinny and quiet, and basically, unusable. Thankfully though, the last few lines were spoken very loudly and very near camera, resulting in good quality and usable audio that only needed slight adjustments.

Another problem that only occurred a few times in this scene was the change in white balance. At times, I changed the white balance and recorded different takes, but foolishly I left out the possibility of the better take having the wrong white balance, meaning the clips wouldn't match up. This involved heavy colour grading, including both luma and chroma, brightness and contrast, and saturation, which I thought when edited to a suitable standard looked very grainy. So to fix this, I dynamically linked the clip I wanted to Adobe After Effects and applied the "Reduce Grain" effect.

Regardless of colour and audio issues, I'm very happy with how this scene looks.

One slight change I made after talking with my lecturer was the part where Mike eats his food. My original edit shows Mike taking three bites and then his plate is empty, which has always annoyed me, but I didn't know how I could fix it for fear of running over the time limit. After talking with him, he said I could add more macro shots of him eating and jump cut them together, to suggest he's eating lots quickly. After trying this, I am much happier with how it looks.

Editing Scene 1

After adding what I had reshot from day 2, scene 1 began to take shape. Again, this scene also had white balance errors, making it very difficult to colour grade, but I'm happy I have made it look as good as it can with the footage I had.

There were two shots in particular that stood out for me for things I needed to fix; One was the date and time on Sarah's phone. In scene one, Mike comes home from work to discover no food has been made for him because, as Sarah says, it is Valentine's day, however, rather than being roughly 05:00pm on the 14th of February, the phone read "10:43am 17th April". 

It didn't even enter my mind that it would happen, but even though it is only visible for a matter of frames, I needed to fix it.

To do this, I sent the clip to After Effects, created an adjustment layer and rotoscoped around the blue square on the phone's screen. As Sarah picks the phone up, I had to move the mask layer frame by frame following its movement.

After doing this, I applied a camera blur to the layer so that the time and date were no longer visible.

This is how the phone looks now:

The next shot that I needed to fix was this one below; mine and my sound operator's reflections are clearly in shot, again only for a few frames, but it was still enough to take the viewer out of the film if they noticed it.

Again to fix this, I created another adjustment layer and used the rotobrush tool to select the red back drop. 

As the camera shakes in this shot, the it was very difficult to match the mask layer to its movement. To suppress the shake, I used the warp stabilizer tool, which removed it completely. Finally, I applied Gaussian blur to the mask layer to blur out our reflection, and it worked. Here is the finished shot:

Editing Scene 2

The biggest advantage with scene 2 is that there is no dialogue, only music. Scene 2 is where we meet the real Sarah, in her most fragile and true state. I wanted a sort of dreamy-flashback looking sequence for this scene, even though it is the present day, as I feel it demonstrates how fragile someone's emotions are, which is what I wanted to convey.

To do this, I applied a vignette to each clip, and I also duplicated each clip and placed it directly above it on the timeline, to which I then lowered the opacity to 40% and added lots of blur for a glowing effect. Finally I increased each clip's brightness. This is how it looks before and after this process:

I'm really happy with how this scene looks, the only problem was that I had a song in mind for it ever since I wrote it, but I couldn't use it if I wanted to enter it into festivals as it was copyrighted, and I couldn't find a copyright free song that would do it justice, so I asked my lecturer if when submitting it to him, I could submit the copyrighted song to demonstrate what I mean, to which he said I could.

The song is called "Kaifuku suru Kizu" by Saylu. I originally heard it in Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill Vol. 1" in a scene where the film's protagonist discovers a room filled with Samurai Swords.

Editing Scene 3

Scene 3 is probably my favourite scene, purely because of how much better it looks in term of exposure and aperture. There is minimal noise and very little colour correction needed doing. I do however think due to the 8 minute time pressure (which I was already over at this point), the scene happens too quickly. If I were to extend the film, I could add more to it.