Editing, Visual Effects and Music
I began editing after filming my first two scenes.
The first scene I edited was the scene where Skinner wakes up from his nightmare. I edited this scene in its own sequence, piecing it together but not adding any effects or colourisation to it at this stage. The start of this scene begins abruptly after the end of the last one, which, at this stage, had not yet been filmed, so I had to leave some space at the startof the clip to work with and not get attached to how I began the sequence.
The next sequence I edited was the first scene of my product: the scene where Skinner is running through a field. The sequence I used for this eventually became the master sequence. The ending of this scene includes the flip-transition into the red room, which I had not yet filmed, so again, I had to leave some room for adjustment at the end of this scene.
After filming the red room scene, I first cut it together, leaving the start of the scene alone as it wuold require some further visual effects. However, the entire scene did require some visual effects, as I needed to make Meredith - the dead girl haunting Skinner's dreams - appear seemingly out of thin air.
To create this effect, I made sure to shoot a master shot of my actor for Scott reacting to the 'appearances' of Meredith. In reality, when behind the camera, I just snapped my fingers when I wanted him to look to each of the designated marks I had set for the appearances of Meredith. With this long shot done, I positioned the actor playing Meredith in the same marks and had her deliver her lines. Throughout all of this, the camera was completely still. To put it all together, I used Adobe After Effects. Using the Master shot as the backdrop, I timed the 'appearances' of Meredith to me snapping my fingers behind the camera, which synced up Skinner's reactions to Meredith's appearances. I then masked around Meredith each time, which made only that portion of the frame visible, thus creating a composite shot. This made it look like the shot of Skinner reacting and the shots of Meredith were part of the same shot, when in reality they were shot separately. I did this for all three of Meredith's appearances, as shown below.
When filming this scene, I made sure that Meredith didn't overlap any of the sections of the frame that Skinner's head was in, because that would have meant rotoscoping around either Meredith or Skinner, which would have been a lot of extra work. Fortunately, this was not necessary.
With thuis visual effects done, I moved onto the transition visual effect, which also used masking. On set, at the end of the final shot of the running scene, I rotated the camera from its standard upright position 180 degress clockwise until it was upside down. I also made sure that the only thing the camera 'saw' at this point was grass; none of the sky or the scene above. Thenm at the start of the red room scene, I performed the same rotation, only this time I began with the camera upside-down and rotated it so that it was the right way up. Going again into After Effects in post-production, I first lined up the clips so that the rotational movements synched up i.e. when the running scene's camera reached 180 degrees of rotation the red room's camera was also at 180 degrees and contined the rotation smoothly. Then, using the line formed by the sky meeting the grass in the running room shot, I drew a mask, which I then keyframed to follow the rotational movement of the skyline. This mask cut out of the frame everything below the grassline, and rotated along with the shot itself, leaving empty space underneath the skyline. This revealed the shot below, which was the synched-up red room shot, and created the illusion that teh two shots wee flowing into one another through the continuation of the rotational movement.
The movement of the mask (the orange lines) is shown below.
With all of this done, and the final scene not yet shot, I moved onto colour and music for the first three scenes. I used Adobe Premiere Pro's Lumetri Colour effects to do all of my grading, but the extreme colour that had been used in the red room had come from practical lighting, and grading was used only really to boost contrast and make slight adjustments to balance, exposure andother basic parameters.
For the music in the running scene, I used the music software Logic Pro. There are three separate 'bursts' of musci in this scene, and for each one, I added more layers and more length. The increase in length each time was not dictated by the music but by the edit, so the burst lengths are not always complete bars, which adds to the sense of disorientation as no recognised resolution is found. Each burst introduces something new, with the first one just being a single note/chord drone and the final one having an almost fully formed melody. The final note of the final burst is the tonic of the key, which resolves the piece in a perfect cadence, thus preparing audiences for the end of this scene and the start of the next; however, the abrupt cut-off once again serves to disorientate viewers, as it is somewhat unexpected, particularly when paired with the disorientating visual transition that accompanies it.
For the background music in the red room, I used Ableton Live 9, a separate music software that is more electronic-based, which is what I was looking for with this scene, as opposed to the orchestral arrangement of the running scene. The music here is mostly just an electronic drone that was achieved by layering some synth pads on top of each other and automating certain elements, but towards the end of the scene, the volume gradually increases, extra layers are added, and the warped sound of a ringing phone can be heard. I added lots of effects to this phone sound to make it sound strange, distant and not-quite-real, but of course, it is the ringing phone that wakes Skinner up from his dream. The sound of the ringing phone therefore acts as a sound bridge, a piece of audio present in both the dream and 'reality' that allows audiences to better understand the transition between worlds that has taken place.
With all this done, I put together a rough cut of the first three scenes.
I then shot my fourth and final scene, and edited it in premiere pro. The transition from the last scene to this one was a J-cut, so the audio from this scene comes in before the visuals do, which was something that I had prepared for when editing the previous scene. With this edited, I colour-graded the scene and dropped it into my master sequence. However, because of the windy conditions on the day of filming, the audio in this scene was really poor. So I decided to overdub the audio with my two actors. Recording directly into Premiere Pro (and using the 'Fill Right with Left' effect to overcome Premiere's mono-audio recording problem), each of my actor's individually overdubbed their lines, and I synched them up with the original recording. I soon realised that, by overdubbing my audio, I had added another layer to the general sense of mild unreality that I was trying to achieve in this scene. While this wasn't something I had strived for when going into the overdubbing process - I had just wanted slightly better quality audio - the resulting effect definitely adds to the feel that I'm going for in this scene, and once I realised this, I capitalised on the fact. I then added some royalty-free stock wind sounds, as well as some footstep sounds for when the characters are walking, into the background, trying to match the original audio as much as I could. The result was a much cleaner-sounding product, which adds to the general quality of my piece.
Finally, noticing that some of my shots were quite grainy, I used Red Giant Magic Bullet De-Noiser III to clean up my shots when necessary. This completed my audio-visual production.
The first scene I edited was the scene where Skinner wakes up from his nightmare. I edited this scene in its own sequence, piecing it together but not adding any effects or colourisation to it at this stage. The start of this scene begins abruptly after the end of the last one, which, at this stage, had not yet been filmed, so I had to leave some space at the startof the clip to work with and not get attached to how I began the sequence.
The next sequence I edited was the first scene of my product: the scene where Skinner is running through a field. The sequence I used for this eventually became the master sequence. The ending of this scene includes the flip-transition into the red room, which I had not yet filmed, so again, I had to leave some room for adjustment at the end of this scene.
After filming the red room scene, I first cut it together, leaving the start of the scene alone as it wuold require some further visual effects. However, the entire scene did require some visual effects, as I needed to make Meredith - the dead girl haunting Skinner's dreams - appear seemingly out of thin air.
To create this effect, I made sure to shoot a master shot of my actor for Scott reacting to the 'appearances' of Meredith. In reality, when behind the camera, I just snapped my fingers when I wanted him to look to each of the designated marks I had set for the appearances of Meredith. With this long shot done, I positioned the actor playing Meredith in the same marks and had her deliver her lines. Throughout all of this, the camera was completely still. To put it all together, I used Adobe After Effects. Using the Master shot as the backdrop, I timed the 'appearances' of Meredith to me snapping my fingers behind the camera, which synced up Skinner's reactions to Meredith's appearances. I then masked around Meredith each time, which made only that portion of the frame visible, thus creating a composite shot. This made it look like the shot of Skinner reacting and the shots of Meredith were part of the same shot, when in reality they were shot separately. I did this for all three of Meredith's appearances, as shown below.
When filming this scene, I made sure that Meredith didn't overlap any of the sections of the frame that Skinner's head was in, because that would have meant rotoscoping around either Meredith or Skinner, which would have been a lot of extra work. Fortunately, this was not necessary.
With thuis visual effects done, I moved onto the transition visual effect, which also used masking. On set, at the end of the final shot of the running scene, I rotated the camera from its standard upright position 180 degress clockwise until it was upside down. I also made sure that the only thing the camera 'saw' at this point was grass; none of the sky or the scene above. Thenm at the start of the red room scene, I performed the same rotation, only this time I began with the camera upside-down and rotated it so that it was the right way up. Going again into After Effects in post-production, I first lined up the clips so that the rotational movements synched up i.e. when the running scene's camera reached 180 degrees of rotation the red room's camera was also at 180 degrees and contined the rotation smoothly. Then, using the line formed by the sky meeting the grass in the running room shot, I drew a mask, which I then keyframed to follow the rotational movement of the skyline. This mask cut out of the frame everything below the grassline, and rotated along with the shot itself, leaving empty space underneath the skyline. This revealed the shot below, which was the synched-up red room shot, and created the illusion that teh two shots wee flowing into one another through the continuation of the rotational movement.
The movement of the mask (the orange lines) is shown below.
With all of this done, and the final scene not yet shot, I moved onto colour and music for the first three scenes. I used Adobe Premiere Pro's Lumetri Colour effects to do all of my grading, but the extreme colour that had been used in the red room had come from practical lighting, and grading was used only really to boost contrast and make slight adjustments to balance, exposure andother basic parameters.
For the music in the running scene, I used the music software Logic Pro. There are three separate 'bursts' of musci in this scene, and for each one, I added more layers and more length. The increase in length each time was not dictated by the music but by the edit, so the burst lengths are not always complete bars, which adds to the sense of disorientation as no recognised resolution is found. Each burst introduces something new, with the first one just being a single note/chord drone and the final one having an almost fully formed melody. The final note of the final burst is the tonic of the key, which resolves the piece in a perfect cadence, thus preparing audiences for the end of this scene and the start of the next; however, the abrupt cut-off once again serves to disorientate viewers, as it is somewhat unexpected, particularly when paired with the disorientating visual transition that accompanies it.
With all this done, I put together a rough cut of the first three scenes.
I then shot my fourth and final scene, and edited it in premiere pro. The transition from the last scene to this one was a J-cut, so the audio from this scene comes in before the visuals do, which was something that I had prepared for when editing the previous scene. With this edited, I colour-graded the scene and dropped it into my master sequence. However, because of the windy conditions on the day of filming, the audio in this scene was really poor. So I decided to overdub the audio with my two actors. Recording directly into Premiere Pro (and using the 'Fill Right with Left' effect to overcome Premiere's mono-audio recording problem), each of my actor's individually overdubbed their lines, and I synched them up with the original recording. I soon realised that, by overdubbing my audio, I had added another layer to the general sense of mild unreality that I was trying to achieve in this scene. While this wasn't something I had strived for when going into the overdubbing process - I had just wanted slightly better quality audio - the resulting effect definitely adds to the feel that I'm going for in this scene, and once I realised this, I capitalised on the fact. I then added some royalty-free stock wind sounds, as well as some footstep sounds for when the characters are walking, into the background, trying to match the original audio as much as I could. The result was a much cleaner-sounding product, which adds to the general quality of my piece.
Finally, noticing that some of my shots were quite grainy, I used Red Giant Magic Bullet De-Noiser III to clean up my shots when necessary. This completed my audio-visual production.
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