Post-Production
With Production wrapped, and one quick weekend to wind down, it was time to enter the lab. The lab can be interesting. My school has two computer labs: a mac lab and a PC lab. Both labs are connected to the same server and have all the same software installed, but the PC's are stronger machines. Unfortunately with that being the case, the upperclassmen claimed the PC lab as their own, not letting us in without some form of right of passage. But it's really okay, the macs are great machines too and I personally likes OSX better than Windows anyway. The lab can be a fun place... Lock 15 film students in a room full of computers for about 50 hours and you will get some interesting results. I'll leave it at that. The lab was where I went through the first stage of post production: the edit.
The Edit
Once in Premiere I started editing right away. The first cut of my film went really well, but I did face a small internal battle. I knew we were going to have to screen our first cut to faculty, so while I really wanted to smooth out all of my audio cuts, I was afraid it would be a huge waste of time because I was just going to have to recut a lot of it anyway. But I did it anyway and made my audio sound nice and smooth... and sure enough, after getting some GREAT feedback from faculty, smoothing out the audio proved to be totally worthless as I had to redo it all again anyway. I went through five cuts of the film before I was satisfied with what I had. In the first cut, my professor rightly pointed out that I rode on way too many close ups. Instead of cutting to close ups to make an emotional impact, they served as my primary source of dialogue coverage. So in my second cut I worked really hard to fix that, but as a result I think I had way too many wide shots and not nearly enough close ups. In my third cut, I think I finally found a nice balance. Then came the fourth and fifth cuts, by far the hardest. Getting everything down on my timeline was easy, but by the time I reached my fourth and fifth cuts all that was left to do was fix some minor issues or improve small areas I wasn't quite happy with. Sometimes the difference between a bad cut and a great cut can be just a few frames, and that's what the fourth and fifth cuts came down to: fixing the tiniest issues in an attempt to make a huge impact. I believe in my fifth cut I ended up only making one chance from my fourth cut, but figuring out that one change took just as long as laying down my entire first cut did! The devil's in the details, that's for sure. Once I finessed the edit, I was able to move on to the visual effects.
The Visual Effects
The visual effects in this film were pretty small, and to pull them off I used Adobe After Effects and Adobe Photoshop. The only VFX shots in the film are the shots involving Hope's power cell. To pull off the effect, I made a battery graphic in Photoshop and then motion tracked it onto the prop in After Effects using Corner Pin tracking. Then I just changed the blend mode, slapped some glow on there, and did any necessary rotoscoping (altering the shot frame by frame) work needed to make sure it passed beneath Hope's shirt. Finally I had to mess with the opacity keyframes in the shot where the battery flickers off. It was all around a pretty simple shot and I'm super happy with how it turned out.
The Color Grade
After my cut with visual effects was complete, I was able to move on to possibly my favorite part of the post production process: color. I graded my film in Da Vinci Resolve using the schools Tangent Wave board, and let me say, I was BLOWN AWAY by the awesomeness of this program and this board. It has spoiled me and I hate color grading on anything else ever since. To grade the film, I made a new timeline in Premiere and flattened it all down to one video layer, then I deleted the sound and exported the sequence as an EDL. In Da Vinci, I imported all of my source media from the server and then imported the EDL and reconnected all the edits in the conform window (now the "edit" window in Resolve 10). The grade itself was really two steps: first I went through and matched the color of all the shots. This was essential because as we shot outside, the light from the sun was always changing due to cloud cover and time of day. Matching all the shots was essential. For this task I relied mostly on the scopes, matching each clip to the clip from that scene that I liked the most. After I completed the color correction, I moved onto the creative part of the process which is the grade. First, I added a lot of emphasis on my characters faces by tracking some power windows over their heads and raising the levels. Second I adjusted the overall color balance of the image. Then I adjusted all of the contrast to something I was happy with. For a lot of the shots, to accomplish the right contrast I used a technique designed to emulate a bleach bypass by creating a layer node, desaturating the top layer, and then chaining the blend mode to overlay. This effect can sometimes look amazing, and in a lot of my shots it really did. Finally I went through and sharpened a lot of shots, especially around the eyes. Adding a sharpening power window around a characters eyes really makes them pop, a trick I learned from colorist David Lindberg. Check out his website, http://lindbergdavid.com for some great inspiration. Once I completed all of these steps (which took about two entire days) I exported my footage as uncompressed 4:2:2 8-bit (what the Canon XF305 shoots in) and brought it back into Premiere. Now it was time to move onto audio.
The Sound Mix
For my sound mix I used Adobe Audition. I like to think of sound as one of those areas that I think I know a lot about but I really don't. Every time I think I learn how to do something really cool, I listen to some reference of professional mixes and realize how crappy mine really is. Reference is so important: when you are sitting in a sound room by yourself listening to nothing but your own mix for 6 straight hours, you start making some decisions that you think are great. Then you leave for 2 hours to grab some lunch, come back, give it a listen and want to slap yourself in the face. My biggest piece of advice for sound mixing: unless you are a professional, educated mixer, listen to professional mixes for reference and try to match them. It will help you a ton, and this is something I WISH I had done during "Starfishing." Instead I tried to mix it myself, which proved to be a huge challenge. Nonetheless, after 4 or 5 days in the mixing room banging my head on the desk wondering why nothing seemed to work, I think I came out with something pretty decent compared to what I started with. The natural sound of the alleyway was horrible, and I did a fairly good job I think of pulling a good amount of that sound out of the shots. I pulled enough anyway to make the dialogue at least understandable, which I was satisfied with after 4 days of going nowhere. I ended up using a notch filter to pull out background sound. The notch filter identifies specific frequencies and eliminates them with a little bit of falloff on the surrounding frequencies. It worked wonders in my alleyway in ways that noise reduction could never dream, and when paired with track EQ's and the sound effects, I think it turned out alright. Something that was really fun about the sound mix though was my foley sound effects. Our school has a foley booth set up with all kinds of interesting things to make interesting sounds with. I set up a couple of microphones and recorded some great footsteps, rustling clothes, impacts, breathing, and other various sound effects to use in the film. This was actually a lot of fun, and I could see myself hanging around the foley guys on some film someday just to have fun. I also downloaded a lot of sound effects from Creative Commons websites, which were promptly credited in my film. It all came together to make a decent overall mix, although the sheer amount of on set noise just made it difficult to hear some of the lines, no matter what I tried in post. So this is the part of the blog where I obligatorily state to all budding filmmakers: get good audio on set. You won't regret it. I wish we had been permitted the use of lavalieres on the F1 set, and also I wish our school had a sound blimp to put over our shotgun microphones. I think that would have made a huge difference. Nonetheless, I think what I ended up with was pretty good, and I'm proud of all the work I put into the mix :)
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Well, today is March 29, 2014, two whole days after taco bell breakfast has been released and I still haven't even tried it. I think I'm gonna head that way now and try one of those AM crunch wraps before heading back to the lab to do everything I just talked about again on my second student film. Oh the life of a film student - it really is awesome :)
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