Production Blog: Editing

 

After concluding our film review and identifying the weaknesses of our project we began to outline how we planned to correct our errors. We began to do this by determining which specific areas of the film were of the lowest quality and the specific issues that were occurring rather than just identifying the general problem. After completing this process we decided that the best option would be to reedit and utilize further editing to increase the quality of the shots rather than reshooting. We deemed this option most fit because the actors in the film are all very busy outside of school and an unexpected reshooting would be extremely difficult. We also decided upon this posture because undergoing a long and grueling process would also require us to scrap camera work and angling that would be extremely difficult to recreate. These difficulties in reshooting and gathering groupmates to film our project is what swayed our decision to repair via editing.

   We began this re-editing process via our group deciding that dialogue in the elevator along within the garage would be of most importance. We began to reedit the elevator scene by first attempting to just remove the beeping of the elevator from which all of our issues stemmed. We tried valiantly to make this work by splitting the scene into multiple parts in which we lowered the audio levels of the elevator beeps while maintaining the dialogue.  Despite our best efforts, this approach did not work as there was too much overlap in the elevator beeps and the dialogue. To combat this my group decided to revert to the backup plan in which we would record a voiceover for the scene. This was extremely easy as the voice-over only required two of my actors who are always available. This voice-over was quite simple with the dialogue being concise, despite this capturing emotion was much more difficult than in person as to it's harder to get into the acting role when doing a voice acting role. Despite this, we got over the hurdle and made work after a few attempts and we got a voice-over that we applied over the original track. We went about syncing the clips by breaking up the voiceover into multiple parts and adjusting the speed to make the audio coincide with the mouth movements. After this, we lowered the sound of our voiceovers and then chopped up the audio levels of our scene. We did this to remove the talking portion of the audio and keep the elevator beeping noises for ambiance. These changes however did slightly lower the quality of the original take. This is because our lack of professional equipment limited our ability to synthesize the audio with the video tracks. Overall though it was a good idea to undergo this change in the audio of this scene as it greatly improved the listening experience. This fulfilled our goal of making not only the viewing experience of the project positive but also the listening one.