The Interview... Screening & Final Thoughts

Last night our films were exhibited at The Little Theater; which doubled up as a competition to decide the best films that had been made in the second half of the year. I am happy that 'The Interview' was screened and not 'Man Without A Movie Camera', as this time we are a much more tight knit group of individuals who all brought to the production. Also I feel satisfied with the quality of this film, as last time it wasn't until a late stage that we discovered that it was up to Me Gus and Luke to take control of the film.

The screening of our film didn't go to plan though, as two shots for some reason had no dialogue, which I thought would stop people from understanding the story. The end of the night came, and after 2nd place was announced as 'The Vision' I thought we had no hope, and that the lack of sound had destroyed out chances. But when it was announced that we won! I couldn't believe it, I didn't even leave my seat to collect the bottle of Champagne because I was in such shock. Afterwards, we spoke to other people from our course who said that they had voted for us because they were surprised at the sheer quality of the film from its location and look to the actors. I was chuffed to have won and to receive this level of peer feedback on something that I had been working so closely with for the past few months, even though I was slightly disappointed by the sound cutting out.

Other than what I have done, which you have witnessed on my blog. Everybody has made such a huge contribution to film to make it stand out, Mark for his lighting; Elspeth for finding the location and the professional actor; Josh for the music; and Gus for helping shape the story. This film is something we are all proud of, and hopefully we can take it on to bigger and better things. We are going to enter our film in to various film festivals which at the moment consists of sending it to future shorts, encounters and crystal palace film festival, after we make a few slight sound adjustments.

The Interview... Colour Grading

After struggling in the past and still being determined to try and get colour grading right, I felt that this was the time to get it right. It is only now that I understand that a big part of colour grading is making sure that the skin colour tones look right, however, it is acceptable to have a stylised colouring system such as in the matrix where everything is a shade too green. Although I wanted to get the tones right, I also wanted to get a nice 'filmic' look to the film. This was possible with the 7D as it meant that we were able to crush the blacks, which makes it look
sharper.
As you can see this increased the look of the film ten fold in comparison to the footage from the z1 for man without a movie camera. However, just before we finished up a professional colour gradist came in and spent an hour on it, but like us struggled, because the screen was not able to cope with our HD footage. I think that although he knew what he was doing I had spent two days working on it, and in his hour he only just came to terms with how to work with our footage, which may mean that my colour grade looks better. I can't be sure of this however, because neither worked on the colour grading monitor, but we will see at the screening.

The edit overall now it is finished look great I am very happy with it. Although, I can across a lot of problems due to the sound, I think that it helped me learn techniques that will be transferable to future productions. The 7D meant that we had an untidy work flow and a lot more rendering time than would have been necessary if we shot in standard definition. This has paid off and I think we now have a film that is worthy of being exhibited to audiences that aren't from our course and entering external festivals. Whilst making this film I have become a lot more adept to final cut pro, and have created an edit where I have done more than create a sequence of images. The extra things that I have done have stepped up the aesthetic values of 'The Interview'. The location and the older actors have also contributed to a film that is not obviously a student film, which we were trying to avoid and have done successfully. Over the course of this module, I have learned skills that will make me capable of independently creating films. Hopefully our hard work and effort pays off and people like it!

The Interview... The Edit

As we shot digitally as opposed to on tapes and captured the audio separate logging our footage was a much more complicated process. After putting the information from the memory cards on to the computer we had to use MPEG Streamclip to change the file format to a Quicktime Movie so that it could be read by final cut. To sync the audio we used a program called pluraleyes, which I highly recommend for DSLR users. The program runs as a final cut plug in, where you insert your clips with reference audio and the recorded audio in to the time line (they don't have to be in line with the right clip) and then get it to sync audio. Its that simple! However, it did lead to a very messy workflow which made editing a lot more unorganised, as all of our takes were in a time line as opposed to where all the content usually is.

This meant that doing the rough edit was tough, as it led to scrolling through the a long time line to find the best shots (as you can see above the time line was over 2 hours long). However, after the initial rough edit was put together, it was less of a problem as we knew the shots that we wanted to use. As Me, Josh and Elspeth all done edits, we decided to copy and paste our favorite parts of each other to create the ultimate edit. This however, was made slightly more difficult by Josh having a newer version of Final Cut Pro than University. This meant that we could not copy across his work, so to transfer the shots across, we noted the shot and its in and out points from the the clip and copied it across.

After we had a sequence that we were happy with, we needed to deal with the sound. In hindsight I feel that we should have done this after we had colour graded and had a picture lock. This is because we couldn't edit the pictures any more, as we feared that Rich Wood who was helping us with the sound might do things it, which would then be obsolete if we changed the sequence. After discovering no quick route to dealing with the issues of the tape recorder making a noise and then not, we had to go through every shot in the interview room and take it out manually. This was done by using a Soundtrack Pro add on called de-noiser by izoetope, where you identify to the program which sound you don't want in the clip and it suppresses its sound. As the scene in the interview room was only 3 mins it took about an hour to go through each clip individually in order to get it sounding good, however the levels still needed to be adjusted which Rich helped us to do. (This is what iZotope looks like).

Software... Remember Bump Top?

Bump Top. The cool looking software that completely changed the way we see a workspace on our computer that I blogged about a couple of months ago? Well according to their website they have been bought by Google! This is great for the Bump Top company as I'm guessing they cashed in, and their software may become the future of our user interface, just as Google Chrome is slowly becoming everybody's favorite browser, and Google Video... I mean YouTube ,which they also bought, is the 3rd most visited website on the web. Hold on... Google also own blogger! In this technical age we are all just a part of Google user interfaces. I thought Google were an ethical company? So why do they keep buying everybody and creating a monopoly (seriously!)... I can't decide where I stand on all of this. What do you think?

Anybody who wants Bump Top... Its still available here as they can't put it on their official website.