Diary Entry - Filming & Editing No.1 #13

   Today's filming was for the ext. shots after the protagonist has left the 'Dream World'. For a first days filming, the production was relatively simple, but we knew we had to set up some rules and requirements before we started filming to make everything a lot easier. For this sequence shown above the goal was to create a few shots that when edited together would simultaneously integrate and thus create a shot in itself. The editing was of course going to be tricky because of all the factors that we had to consider (Framing, lighting, footwork, depth of field etc.). We didn't want to have to resort to a green screen either because we thought that this kind of editing would loo a lot more organic to the audience and although there may be glitches somewhat throughout the sequence they're only minor and they enforce the realism of it as a whole.

     For the filming we had to make sure that I and the camera was in exactly the same places for every location that we filmed. There were many attempts at trying to find a tape measure or any other instrument we could use to record every distance and make the accuracy more viable, but unfortunately we couldn't find any and we had to resort to just using vague amount of footsteps every time. I did know that we had little time in order to film these shots and with that knowledge as well as the limited amount of knowledge on the framing etc. we produced loads of shots (more than we needed to) in order to give us that extra amount of reliability.

       Next came the editing of the shots, and this was by far the more complex of the two processes. It included many tedious refinements towards the end of the edit for myself and this was the most time consuming part of the job. The pictures/screenshots below show all the aspects that the editing consisted of, and although the sequence is only 5-7 seconds long, there was a lot of hard work and thought put into it to make it perfect. 

   First of all I had to find the shots that I wanted, and ones that represented the theme of urban to country. Once I had done this the important thing to further lay down the foundations to the edit was to arrange and split each video so that they are roughly the right points at which they will be played through together at the end. The final bit was to refine each video so that I would look to be walking through different locations simultaneously and without any hiccups a long the way.

    For this final factor to the editing I had to use many tools within FCP X to help me sufficiently throughout the edit. The first one to use that was very helpful was the zoom tool on the clips. This of course helped because it meant that I could make very small tweaks to each clip.

    The next part of the process would be the most significant one. I had to now frame and transform each clip to match one another. For this I used the inspector to transform the scale and more importantly the position of the clip. The highlighted position of X in the clip shows how I tweaked the clips in very tiny amounts to try to make it that much better, and this proved to be an extremely helpful tool. Once I had done this for all the clips all I had to do now was lessen the extent at which the locations change (colour and lighting wise). 


   To change and match the colour of the clips to one another to try and make them flow prodigiously with one another, I had to 'Colour correct' each clip. I tried using the 'Match Colour' and the 'Balance Colour' tools at first but these proved to not be as beneficial as one would hope, and thus led me to manually changing the appearance of the clip. 
    The screenshots below show the level of corrections; one for colour and one for brightness and contrast. The most important to myself was the change of the brightness and the contrast, because I wasn't wanting to make each scene look the same colour etc. I was wanting myself/the protagonist to be the same colour and brightness throughout. This is what made the multiple clips collaborate so well. Therefore to do this I used the tool shown in the second screenshot below to finely tune each clip to its predecessor and successor within the timeline.