Construction Post 26: Edit week 2: titles, video FX, grading

In advance of our second edit week, we created an edit schedule to coordinate our editing time outside of class. We agreed to schedule as much free time that we had available, because we knew this week would be labour intensive scoping our opening sequence for any problems we could fix, and experimenting with the text, grading and sound to achieve the best results in all of these facets.

Titles

On Live Type, I found it interesting experimenting with the different effects we could give our titles. I particularly liked how many facets of the effects could be changed to create the effect we wanted. For instance, I sped up an effect that made the letters appear one by one to make them look like they were being typed by a computer. This made them more suitable for the tone and genre of our film opening.

Me editing titles on LiveType

Grading 

On Adobe Premiere Pro, we had the option of changing the colour palate of our film. We decided that a dark, blue colour suited the suspenseful tone of of our film opening and reflected the colour of many  mystery films. I particularly thought that the three colour changer wheels gave us a lot of freedom to find the perfect colour combinations.

The three colour wheels available on Adobe Premiere Pro - shadows, midtones, highlights

Sound Mixing

We could also create alter the sound quality of the soundtrack and the dialogue. This was very useful for us as there were moments when the volume of people's dialogue or sound effects would spike, and by adding key-frames, we were able to keep the audio consistent and comfortable to listen to.

With this, we could see when the audio volume would spike.

I believe this week went very well. We finished our titles, grading and sound mixing in good time and our group cooperated well to agree upon the best option from our experimentations. Initially we had a much longer cut that lasted over three minutes, so at the end of the second edit week, we created a shorter cut that was closer to 'two minutes' as mentioned in our project's brief. This is the cut we eventually decided upon using, because the story and characters were all still clearly defined and the shots we did cut did not add much more to either. Overall, I believe this week was a success.