Post-Production & Audience Feedback.pptx

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1. Post-Production B2

2. Post-Production – The Software For editing my shot project, I used the most familiar and powerful editing software that I had access to which is Adobe Premiere Pro. I have used this because it has proven to me to be a very reliable and high-quality editing software which is suitable for editing longer content like short films. Another reason for choosing this software for the foundation of my short film post production is because it is a desktop application; meaning I can use it on my computer at home. Using my computer at home is very important as it is quite powerful and easily edits without any lag and with shorter render times.

3. Post-Production – The Software Using Premiere Pro also is very flexible with the formats in which you want to export your project in. For example, for my short film, I want it to look a certain way, Premiere Pro allows this as it gives me the flexibility to render/export the finished short film in full 4K quality or even use exotic formats such as HDR to improve the colour and overall look of the image. Expanding on this idea of Premiere Pro allowing me to expand my artistic intent, it has a complex and expansive colour grading system which allows me to perfectly capture the mood of a scene through the colour used, I intend to use this a lot in the film.

4. Editing Day 1 – 7 th March 2024 Today is the first day of post-production, I am hopping straight in to editing to keep up with the shooting of my short film. Today will mainly be setting up the project on Premiere Pro and ensuring all settings are correct, it has been a short while since I last used Premiere Pro, I will also be refamiliarizing myself with the editing software so that I don’t make any rookie mistakes along the way. Straight away, I need to make some important creative decisions that I have brain-stormed over the pre-production process, such as, making parts of the film black and white.

5. Editing Day 2 – 8 th March 2024 On to the 2 nd day of editing for my short film, today will be much more practical than the last, as I have not yet filmed the actual start of the short film, I am going to be editing in an unorthodox way. The footage that I have shot is the footage for chapter 4 of my short film, which is quite a way into it. I am going to counter this by splitting the film in to drafts. I will also create separation ‘transitions’ in premiere pro, which clearly state what part of the film it is.

6. Editing Day 2 – 8 th March 2024 Today’s editing day was a lot of figuring out what footage goes where and sorting my folder of footage for efficiency later. Most footage was shot chronologically for the respected chapter, so this made it quite easy to figure out where the required footage was. A very helpful tool in this matter was Windows’ Sort By tool which allows you to sort by ‘Date Modified’ which order the entire folder in chronological order, which as mentioned prior, it is perfect for me. From here on, it is time to assemble the timeline.

7. Editing Day 3 – 9 th March 2024 Today, the exciting part of editing begins, which is assembling the footage into a timeline and seeing how the footage looks when cut and stitched together. I am editing in chronological order of the shooting day, so I will be starting with the beginning, and all the way to the end, of Chapter 4. Despite the high file size and overall high quality of the footage shot, Premiere Pro did not struggle with timeline scrubbing or anything related to possible lagging during editing.

8. Editing Day 3 - Problems When exporting footage in to Premiere Pro, there is weird behaviour with the file format in which the iPhone 14 shoots videos in. The iPhone shoots in Apple’s own QuickTime format which Premiere Pro does support, however, there is problems. When dragging in footage to the timeline, it simply ignores this. To fix this, I had to click the import button at the top of the software, and manually find and click on the footage that I wanted to import. Overall, this problem wasn’t detrimental to the entirety of my project, but it was just a minor inconvenience. The footage played perfectly when imported this way.

9. Editing Day 4 - 10 th March 2024 On the fourth day of editing now. I am now going to be making creative adjustments to the footage and creating the mood and atmosphere of the film. I have started with the colour of the short film, or lack thereof. The entire short film will NOT be black and white, however, the majority of it will be, this is symbolic to the plot of the film, so there is a creative reason for this to occur. I achieved black and white by simply turning the saturation to 0 in the Lumetri Colour panel of Premiere Pro, I did this as it was the easiest and most time efficient way of achieving a grey scaled look.

10. Editing Day 4 – 10 th March 2024 I used a ‘dip to black’ transition here, which makes the 2 parts of this scene stitch together perfectly. I added a gap between the parts too, this is to make the black frame display on the screen for about a second. This makes it a different kind of transition. Here I inserted subtitles into the short film; I used Helvetica, which is a font that is easy to read wen used as subtitles and is widely used across the industry. The reason I added the subtitles here is because the dialogue can be a little bit hard to understand, it also adds a bit of creative flare.

11. Editing Day 4 – 10 th March 2024 Across my entire project, I have adjusted the gain of the recorded audio from the iPhone, this is to reduce the sounds of ambient noise as the iPhone likes to overblow a lot of the audio. Additionally, I have changed the balance of the audio. To do this I had to wear headphones and use the ‘Balance’ filter on Premiere Pro to make sure the audio throughout the film is consistent.

12. Editing Day 4 – 10 th March 2024 At this point in the film, there is an eery occurrence. For this I have added a song by Tyler The Creator called IGOR’S THEME which starts very loudly with an 80’s style synth, this brings an old horror film feel to my scene which I think suits it perfectly. I took some time to time the song with the camera movement to add impact. Adjusting the gain was important to not overpower the mix of the film and knock the music out of place. The gain was adjusted about -10dB to ensure it's not too loud whilst still leaving an impact. I also made sure that the copy of the song that I obtained was of high quality and didn’t have any off-balance audio.

13. Editing Day 4 – 10 th March 2024 I used another ‘Dip to Black’ transition here to show the change in location between the two parts of the scene. For my scenario, this was a simple and time efficient way of showing the audience that some time has passed, and our character is now at a different location. At the end of the chapter, I faded out the music. As I will be adding a transition later in my post-production process. I have made sure that the music fades out slowly so that it isn’t jarring to the audience.

14. Short Film Draft 1

15. Short Film Draft Feedback

16. Short Film Draft Feedback Overall, the feedback to my first draft of my short film is very positive, most of the good feedback was mentioning the overall mise en scene of the film, mentioning colour, camera work and editing. There was a negative bit of feedback to the short film which mentioned that the music is too loud, I will use this feedback and slightly decrease the gain of the music to make it less over-bearing. However, the music being loud is intentional so I will make a compromise.

17. Editing Day 5 – 12 th March 2024 After another shooting day, I had much more footage to work with in my editing. This day was simply assembling a new chapter of my short film and making sure that the project is assembled in the order that I want my film direct towards. Once again, I used a marker at the beginning of this chapter to keep my editing environment organized so that I can remain editing efficiently down the line in the post-production process.

18. Editing Day 5 – 12 th March 2024 At this point in my short film, I made another decision to add music to my scene. The song I chose is Sparks by Coldplay. It is a calm, chilled out song that adds to the atmosphere that I want to send across to the audience. In my opinion, it matches the scene perfectly. After adding in the music, I opted to keep the audio recorded from the shooting in the film. I did this as I didn’t want the film to be totally silent with just music at this part. I personally think that this was the right decision and adds a bit of flare to the scene.

19. Editing Day 5 – 12 th March 2024 At this point, I began fading in and out the music depending on what was happening in the scene. Here, I faded out the audio so the audience could hear the shower in the scene. This is to raise awareness. This is mostly the same, except I lowered the gain of the music here to switch the audience's focus but also keep the music and rhythm going.

20. Editing Day 5 – 12 th March 2024 Here, I made a mini-montage of my character waking up and getting ready for the day. I added a special effect here in which I split the frame in half on one side so that I can add part of another frame on the empty side. This means I can ‘duplicate’ myself as seen on the right. This effect is cool visually and shows that the character is doing this fast and is showing that he has done this many times before. I adjusted the contrast and colour values of the scene to hide the split in the frame as I discovered a problem with the lighting being ever so slightly different, despite being filmed around the same time and in the same unmoved position.

21. Editing Day 5 – 12 th March 2024 Since this part of the film is going to be in full colour, it was time to decide the colour grade for my work. I worked carefully to make sure that the grade wasn't jarring or distracting. The aim was to create a peaceful mood with a villainous undertone, so I decided with a slightly green hue, inspired by some British films and The Matrix, this was very effective and to my liking. I also drastically increased the contrast as the British look of the film has been an aim since the start to me. I really wanted to drown out the dark parts of the image whilst also bringing down the bright parts heavily also, this mutes the Dynamic Range of the scene making it feel more subtle and moody.

22. Short Film Draft 2

23. Short Film Draft 2 Feedback

24. Short Film Draft 2 Feedback Once again, the feedback to my 2 nd draft of my short film is very positive. Main points go over the camera work and colour manipulation that I performed in the Post-Production of the film. The story that I had written for the film has also been commended. There is a negative point, and that mentions a disconnect between scenes with colour and scene without. This will be fixed in the final draft of the film as I will have extra chapters and a more gradual change in colour over a longer period of time.

25. Editing Day 6 – 13 th March 2024 The effect that I used here is much like before, I have split the frame in half, however, using the same camera angle I can change one half of the frame to improve the pacing of the film. Here, the TV is only showing a black screen, but to make the scene transition more smoothly, I have cut the right half of the frame ahead to show the TV being turned on. An exponential fade transition was used to make this effect more smooth and less noticeable

26. Editing Day 6 – 13 th March 2024 For this scene, the camera was handheld, so in post I had to stabilize the camera using the ‘Warp Stabilizer’ effect on Premiere Pro, this made it much less distracting to watch and stabilized the wide shot that I intended.

27. Editing Day 6 – 13 th March 2024 In this scene, the audio from the film ‘Oppenheimer’ is playing, at the beginning the audio is actually recorded on set, from the speakers. However, when the camera cuts and the shot is changed, I have switched to the sound from the film itself. To not make the audio sound jarring, I have added a Reverb filter to the audio to make it sound as if the audio is still coming from the room that is in shot when it is actually just an audio file of the film itself. I think this effect paid off nicely.

28. Editing Day 6 – 13 th March 2024 In this small snippet, the red colour recorded by the camera was not red enough, to counter this I adjusted the hue and saturation to adjust the colour to my liking.

29. General Improvements Across the entire project, I have adjusted the gain of the audio and added fade effects to it, this is because when cutting between different clips in the short film, the cutting between the audio is obvious to the audience. The fading of the audio very much helps with this and almost makes cuts in audio invisible. There are also other ways in which I solved this difficult problem, and that is in the silent parts in the film where there is nothing but ambient noise in the mix. For this, when there is cuts in the visuals, I have left the audio running from the previous clip so that there is no change in the audio that can be noticed, I have made sure however that the audio makes sense in the context. The main goal was to make the audio as seamless as possible for the audience.

30. General Improvements Here at the beginning in the film, the filming is done outside, I have added many effects to the audio such as panning, gain adjustments and noise reduction. These all work in tandem to improve the audio quality and reduce unwanted sounds such as wind and sounds made from the camera operator. The goal here was to make the dialogue as clear as possible without totally removing background noise as it would sound “awkward” and ruin the feeling of the film. These improvements are also made throughout the entire short film, however, mainly done when the scene is filmed outside as this is where the problems lie.

31. Audience Feedback to Finished Project

32. Audience Feedback to Finished Project Thankfully, the feedback to my short film is positive, the audience tends to mention the editing and writing of the film. This was expected thanks to the feedback gained throughout the drafting process and in the final product, I have fixed as many problems as possible that the audience had outlined. A negative point mentioned that some shots be adjusted, I will make sure that shots are even more carefully produced in future productions.

33. My Project. This is most of the timeline for my entire project, it is the culmination of around a month's worth of work and many creative decisions.

34. Post-Production Evaluation Overall, I would call my project a success, Post-Production started what feels like a long time ago and there is a very good feeling to see that my product is finished. In the beginning it took a lot of refamiliarizing with Adobe Premiere Pro to get used to, but I felt like my skills have very much improved over this Post-Production process. It has been a very fun process to look back at my own footage and choose my own music to put over the film making sure that it all glues together successfully. It took a lot of patience in the end to make sure that the short film was exported successfully and that no mistakes were made in the final process.