Tuesday 13 November 2007

Post-Production

Once I came back to university I immediately started to capture my footage onto one of the Macs in our University editing suite. Despite not having done the actual filming, I had the advantage of already having looked at the footage on a small monitor during filming. Therefore I was able to make notes on what was being shot when (by looking at the time-code on monitor screen) and in which way. Hence the capturing process went very straight forward.

When I finished my capture I decided to start the edit by concentrating on the main part of the film - the making of the violin. Again I managed to use my written out VO text as a guideline to the careful selection of shots in the correct order. I managed to intercut wide angle shots with close ups, over-the shoulder shots with facial close-ups etc. Because during the filming process I concentrated on what I needed for editing the film, making sure that I had a variety of shots from different sizes and angles which could easily be intercut with one another, editing seemed all a lot easier than it did in any of my previous film or television productions.

Once I finished the raw edit for the main body of the film I began to concentrate on the opening sequence and the small history section during introduction. Unfortunately this is where I had to face my first difficulties. In order to successfully portray the history of violin making I had to use several images of i.e. old portraits of famous violin makers or photos of very old and valuable violins. In spite of never having work with images in an edit previously, I managed to upload them onto Final Cut and play them inside the preview window. Unfortunatelly, whenever I dragged them onto the timeline, the quality would increase. This problem, as I later learned, was not going to be fixed as there wasn't any way of changing the pictures quality. But fortunatelly the images were going to look much better when viewed on a Television screen and hence I could do nothing other than continue with what I was doing.

During a later stage of the edit I also managed to display the images, visible in the history section, in a more appealing way. By panning across them and/or zooming in and out, they seemed a lot more lively and closer to how someone would imagine a tv program to look like. Next I made sure that the entire edit looked clean and cut to the finish, so that I could then begin to add my chosen background music.

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