Part of the criteria for the Film Reproduction assignment is to create your own title sequence. This can be done in either After Effects or Photoshop, and I chose the former as I am more skilled with it.
Lining up letters to make the animation work.
My idea was to take the regular typeface of the title, and animate the claw like letter Es to make it so the claws extend after the title fades in. The meant having to separate pieces of text so that the animation would not affect other letters.
Keyframing the animations.
In order to animate this title, I used black boxes that would shoot to the right of the screen so that the claws look as though the extend. I also keyframed the opacity of the entire thing at the start and end so that it would fade in and out respectively.
The film is relatively, and appropriately, slow paced, except for the dance scene in the middle. The cuts are more frequent and are on the beat, but the problem is that the dance scene seemed to drag on a little bit within its second half, which loses the novelty of the gag within the scene, rendering it unfunny and losing its point in terms of audience reactions.
As a result of this slow pace, we're going to shoot a new scene to add more content, meaning we will not have to drag the dance scene for as long in order to reach the 5 minute mark.
There are multiple highlights in terms of editing techniques within the film, which include match cuts, cutting to motion, and the use of effective sound mixing.
These two frames cut with each other to produce a smooth transition.
The motion in both shots create a seamless transition.
Throughout the film, the use of music is important but the sound is produced in different ways diegetically. When the music is coming through the headphones, it has a tinnier sound but becomes more full and warm when the dance scene to simulate loud speakers.
There are also additional ambient sounds such as the audience cheering in the dance scene and the use of phones and humming printers and equipment in the office scene. Using none of this sound would mean a much more shallow sounding film that doesn't engage the audience as well it does when using the real sound placed in during post.
Our new assignment is to take any film and compress it into 4 minutes, while still retaining the story coherently. We must also create titles from scratch using Photoshop or After Effects.
An excerpt from the edit.
To get the audio and video files to edit with, I used a transcoder called HandBrake to rip the files from my DVD copy of The Wolverine. This allowed me to have a digital copy of the film stored onto my hard drive, ready to edit wherever I can.
HandBrake.
I downloaded the video in the highest quality possible in order to retain the audio and picture quality; this meant that the audio wouldn't be totally ruined when exporting the final edit later on.
A piece of the audio track.
As the audio wouldn't cut perfectly with each other every single time, when shortening a film in this manner, I used the default transition called Constant Power to fade the audio into each other, making a seamless audio track.
With regards to what to cut out, I chose to forgo a lot of fighting and action scenes as they were not as essential to the plot. These scenes were implemented to balance out the pace of the film, but could be dropped in order to cut the film down to 4 minutes.
This first fight scene in the bar was majorly cut to advance the
Following on from a previous post, in which I discussed ruining the context of a scene with bad editing, I would like to take a more in depth look at continuity and how careful you must be in that regard within film editing.
Continuity is where everything is absolutely consistent throughout a scene, and even the whole film. A prop that a character is holding in one hand shouldn't magically switch over to the actor's other hand throughout the scene, as this makes the editing look more obvious, ruining the suspension of disbelief one should feel when watching a film.
Clip from Resident Evil: The Final Chapter
This clip from the latest installment of the Resident Evil film series is filled with a lot of continuity errors that stem from a lack of consideration for when to cut at which particular frames.
The knife has switched position in Alice's hand.
She already turned her head in the last shot...
Alice was looking straight down, then her head is up again instantly.
Editing mistakes like this can make a film feel disjointed, and ruins the seamless consistency that should be used throughout. You notice the cuts, which is a very bad thing in a film. What you should take away from this lesson is that you need to watch the very specific positions of the characters and objects on screen before making a cut, so that you know which frame to match up with it.
On another note, this enforces a reminder that coverage during shooting is very important, as not filming enough footage can make mistakes like this more and more likely due to a lack of material to work with during post production.
I have now completed my final draft of the history video.
The last few changes that had to be made were slowing the pace down in the D Day section, as well as making further adjustments to the video overlays. They were found to be a little distracting, and some of them didn't even fit in properly; I took them out as a result and instead created a simple film grain effect that isn't too overpowering, but still gives off the aged feel that I was going for.
I created the layer of grain by altering my black and white adjustment layer that I used to make the entire video monochrome. I used a Noise and Gain effect to add onto the layer, which affected the whole video. The initial amount of grain that you see was too much, so I turned it down to the level that is now seen within the video.
With regard to the syncing issue, I moved back all of the audio by about 5 frames, once I exported the timeline XML file to an earlier version of Premiere Pro used in the Mac Labs, and this managed to sort out the sync once exported.
The video is now fully in sync with the audio, and the sequence settings are as they should be, as my laptop did not have the correct settings installed and there was no way of installing them myself.
Further feedback was given to me with regards to my WW2 video.
This time, the Okinawa and Peleliu battle sections had to be sped up to fit with the music better. To speed up the sections I added new images to them and nested their entire sequences to group it all under one item in the timeline. Speeding this item up to 200% speed made the sequence twice as fast, fulfilling the pace criteria.
I've also had to focus a little more on how to convey emotion throughout the entire video. The emotions in the video range from triumph to fear and horror; adding in screaming soldiers was necessary as the fighting scenes would be filled with dying soldiers who are in agony, as well as terrified of their enemy.
Additional sound effects were added such as innocent women and children crying during the Invasion of Poland, Japanese banzai attackers screaming, German soldiers shouting commands and an air raid siren during the Battle of Britain.
A problem occurs on other screens when watching back the video where the audio and video are very slightly out of sync. To try and limit this problem, I've gone back over the whole video and made very fine and precise cuts to the beat and his has reduced the problem rather noticeably.
After receiving feedback for my first video, I made some required changes in order to improve upon my work.
The first change that I made to my video was to improve upon my pacing within the sense of cutting the images to the beat. I have now made it so the images change on every beat, rather than on every new bar. Some sections were also sped up so that they change in eighth note, adding more pace and tension throughout.
Sound effects were also added into this video, and they range from speeches by Hitler and Roosevelt to various battleground sound effects like gunfire and explosions. In addition, I added different film grain and damage effects as using the same overlay all the way through looked monotonous; variation made the video more interesting.
Images were also rearranged in order to make them look more like they're a sequence of events within the space of so many seconds. This made video flow much better as a better sense of coherence was added to the video's events.
Our new assignment is to create a 2 minute long video using images from the internet, as well as sound effects and music of your choosing. The topic is entirely up to you, so I went and chose to do the history of WW2.
This chain of historical events starts from Hitler's rise to Power, all the way to the end of the war in 1945. Events in between include the Invasion of Poland, Pearl Harbour, the Battle of the Bulge and most of the Pacific Campaign.
Editing to the beat is key in this video, so I counted the beat in each song that I used and cut the images to them as precisely as I could. There are no sound effects within my first draft, only accompanying music.
I've also decided to use a film grain, dust and scratches effect throughout the video to make it look more vintage and akin to the motion pictures of WW2. Some images are in colour, so I applied an adjustment layer to make everything black and white.
In film, the use of in camera audio is a bad move. The quality of the audio can never compare to if it were recorded with a professional microphone in a professional setting. This is where Foley comes into play; the practise of reproducing the audio in a film by overdubbing it in a studio and subsequently mixing it into the edit.
An example of Foley in use.
As you can see, the people in the video simply need to follow the onscreen action with whatever object they can use to recreate the sound you would normally hear. In some cases, you don't even need to use the same object as what is onscreen to make the correct sound, like when the woman slices play-doh to simulate a fish being cut open about 26 seconds into the video.
As long as the audio is put together with the video and mixed correctly, the audience will never realise how the sound is actually made, and the suspension of disbelief will continue.
Editing to the beat is a simple technique in which you cut a video to the beat of a song. This is mainly used in music videos but is also included in many films and TV series to create a rhythmic effect that helps the flow of the final edit.
Burning Heart by Survivor
This music video features cuts that occur on the beat of the son quite frequently. It was very appropriate to cut the video this way as the edit has a good sense of rhythm and pace when one watches it.
Sultans of Swing by Dire Straits
As this music video is an earlier example of such, the editing wasn't as on the beat as you cuts and shots that go on for a while. The sense of pace and rhythm in the video is then lost, which makes the video somewhat awkward to watch as one is constantly having to anticipate the next cut.
