Editing

AB - 20/04/13

Editing

 

The Challenges:

Importing

Having spent 2hrs importing both the rough footage and audio from the hard drive onto the computer, we found that the footage could only be accessed when the hard drive and the was connected. This meant that every time we wanted to edit we had to connect the hard drive

Logo

Our logo for Crane Shot Productions is an image rather than film. When we first inserted it the image became stretched and enlarged.

We spent many time in lessons trying to overcome this. Asking our teachers for assistance which they unfortunately weren't able to help us with. We even resulted to looking for help on Google, Apple and YouTube yet we still did not know how to fix it.

Thankfully we did eventually sort it! After clicking on the inserted, warped image a crop sign will appear in the top left of that image on the time line. Click on the crop sign and in the viewing box in the top left corner click fit.

 

Font

The font for our film opening became a real problem for several reasons. The first of which is the lack of choice.

 

 IMovie has a choice of nine fonts, none of which particularly fit our film.In the end we picked American type writer due to one of our influences for our film.

The film Perks of being a wallflower uses type writer font and as we can draw links in the style of our film to this film, we thought it was the best out of the choice that was available to us.

 

We also made further research at title websites to try and get a feel for the sort of title we might use:

 

http://annyas.com/screenshots/2010-2014/

http://www.artofthetitle.com/

Another difficulty we face with the font was that we could only have it aligned in the centre, left or right. Due to the composition of the shots, this choice of alignment was restricting as we needed to be able to move the text to wherever we wanted.

 

To try and help us we looked at you tube videos such as:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=BZDuvIQ-IK0

However none of these helped and unfortunately the text could not be moved.

 

Although the font is not exactly how we would want it to be and the position is not great. However we chose to stick with this. The reason for this is because, we wanted our font and the animation that goes with it to be purposely dissonant from the footage to reflect our protagonists state of mind. Using the titles sudden movement we're trying to reflect her personalities to them. This is to further emphasise her disorder, accompanied by the footage. Together they represent her loss of identity.

If we had more time and the right programmes to customise our own, we would definitely design something that is much more suitable for our film. However, for now this is as close as we can get to our initial idea.

 

Sounds

We have contemplated long and hard about the sounds of our film. Comparing our final project to our plan, we have made some drastic changes. Originally we aimed on having May's voice over in the footage to narrate what's happening in each scene to introduce each personas. However, after debating for a long time on what to do; we have decided to abandone this for the following reason...

1. Due to our limited time, the footage are too short to be accompanied by a voice over. We have recorded Daisy as a practice and used the audio file with our film but it came out clumsy and rushed. It completely lacked the sophistication we desired.
2. Adding a voice over will mean having 3 layers of sounds: Wildtracks, non-diegetic and Voice over. Using the practice audio of Daisy's voice, we tested what it would sounds like and it was chaos. The sounds became too overwhelming and it just became distracting for our footage.
3. Finding the time to record the voice over. Since our actress Vita Oldershaw attends Uni out of Oxford, getting the voice over will involve us travelling to see her to record them. However, due to our mismatching schedules; this proved to be impossible. We didn't want to cause Vita any inconvenience as she had helped us enough already with our film; in addition to this we all had other A-levels which we're committed to.

 

Crane Shot Productions Logo

AB - 19/04/13

Crane Shot Productions: Logo

 

The creation of our logo:

 

Although we knew that we wanted our logo to be associated with the crane bird, we didn't know how we were going to make this picture look creative and at the same time professional. After searching, I finally found an app on my IPad called "Fingerpaint" which allowed us to copy a picture off of Google and make it more eye catching and 'logo worthy'. So, to start off we chose a sketch of a crane bird from Google images and transferred it to the IPad app. We decided that a sketch of the bird would be better than an picture of a real crane as we only wanted the outline and didn't think that our logo should look like a realistic bird but more of a creative drawing.

 

This is the picture that we took from Google Images:

 

 

Dasiy then used "Fingerpaint" to add the colours, using the app's features to make the strokes seem feather like and soft.

 

This is the picture when Daisy had finished adding the colours and effects:

 

 

Unfortunately, we had to find a way of making the background purely white. "Fingerpaint" would not allow us to do this and so I downloaded another app on my IPad called "DrawCast" which then allowed me to carefully colour over the blue lines in the picture above. This did take a few hours but I finally coloured over the majority of the lines so that they were no longer noticeable.

 

 

This is our logo with the background painted completely white:

 





However, our group came to a dilemma when we decided that the white background did not look professional enough and that perhaps our logo would look more striking and 'logo worthy' if we had it on a black background. Unfortunately, we could not find an app or programme that allowed us to just change the colour of the background. Therefore, it took a few more hours to go back to the very original picture that we got from Google Images and use "DrawCast" to colour the entire background black. I was unable to take the picture above and paint the background black with the colouring that Daisy had drawn on already. This is because I was not able to take away all of the white without damaging Daisy's colouring and making the logo look messy. Therefore, I had to go back the the very original picture that we took from Google Images and change the background to black, being careful not to ruin the outline of our bird.

 

This is the picture with a black background but without the colouring of the 'feathers':

 

 

As you can see, I was unable to paint over all of the white without damaging the outline of the bird. However, this was not noticeable once we added on the effects.

 

Daisy then once again used "Fingerpaint" to paint on the 'feathers' of the bird. We did multiple versions of this to see which one worked best.

 

These are some of our practise logos:

 



We finally settled on this next image as our final logo, as we asked the class which one they think looked the best:

Once we had uploaded our image onto IMovie, we noticed that you could change the features of any image. After experimenting, we decided that our final logo would look the most professional and striking in a gold / yellow colour. We did, however, have some trouble with making the image remain still in our opening scene as it kept on moving from one side to the other, as if it was a clip and not a picture. We finally figured out how to make it perfect by clicking on the small button that appeared in the top left hand corner that was almost invisible! (This is also explained in my post on 'Editing').

Here is our final logo!




























Editing

AB - 18/04/13

 

Me, Myself and I: Editing

Challenges with editing:

We have started editing our clips; however due to the high quality of both shots and wild tracks it required us to invest in a hard drive in which where we can store our materials in. Luckily Daisy had a spare harddrive which we've decided to use instead of buying a new hard drive. Though we face difficulty as the hard drive is only compatible on Mac's and we all own a Windows. We managed to transfer our materials into the hard drive by borrowing Daisy's brother's Mac Book. Importing the videos from the camera and audio from recorder into the laptop and into the hard drive.

However, we now have less opportunities to edit as we're incapable of editing at home due to the lack of appropriate gadget which gives us only time in lessons and after school to work on our project. This is because the school has Mac which we're using for editing as Imovie's quality is highly more preferred than Windows Movie Maker and our hard drive is only compatible with Mac's as stated earlier. It will be a challenge editing the clips on Imovie as we're less familiar with its functions. Nonetheless it will help us develop our skills!