Creating The Fine Cut

My process of creating the fine cut has consisted of tweaking and cleaning the rough cut edit:

I have tried to incorporate more footage of the friend mourning over the person he has lost as well as trying to clean some of the edits around these parts. The edits themselves have now actually been sequenced to a specific rhythm. This was a decision I made that would help me when creating the soundtrack to the film, allowing me to easier match the music and sounds with the edits. For example, four edits consisting of two seconds of footage each allows me 8 seconds worth of music that I can match the soundtrack to. Of course, my only worry is that the soundtrack will become too sequenced with the edits that changing something in the dit will mess with the timing and I would have to re-reord or rearrange some of the musical cues.

I will detail in a future blog post my process of creating the soundtrack and my inspirations.

The colour grading of certain shots have been toned down slightly; I felt that some of the choices I had made were a little over-bearing on the overall picture quality and detracted from it. Although the colour is not changed too much, it does not lose any picture quality.

I recorded various sound effects as well as borrowing a few sound clips from freesound.org for certain sounds that I was unable to replicate myself.
My own recorded sound effects included heavy breathing, crashing of cymbals and various booms and bangs. These are intended to add to the overall soundscape and punctuate certain edits, particularly during the scene where the character has a break-down in the park.

I also got another actor to read some lines as the mother to the character who had become lost. My idea was for the mother to be as verbally abusive as possible and that, in the narrative, this constant taunting is what had caused the character to imagine his friend doing the same and causing the break-down. This worked very well and was a very quick recording session as the lines needed were spoken perfectly; there were only a couple of quick re-takes.

I also recorded some lines of dialogue of the same vain, though I feel that my delivery may not be as strong and effective as the other but I shall still use it for the fine cut and decide whether I shall use it or re-record with a different actor later.

I then took these line deliveries and edited them in the 'Audacity' program. The dialogue was overlapped and I also added a reverb effect to give the voices a distant sound, as if they were inside somebody's head. The individual clips were also assigned to different stereo channels to create a sense that the voices were coming from all around. I feel that this process was very effective and sounds good when put underneath the footage.

Other things I added in were various pieces of stock footage. These were pieces of footage that I was unable to get despite my intentions but the ones I managed to find were thankfully suitable for what I needed. The scene which utilises the stock footage features the lost character's descent into the unknown as if he has drifted into another world.

I have also added text on screen to punctuate the voices inside the main character's head that slowly fade in and out. I feel that the current text I have used is not particularly convincing and doesn't fit the style of the rest of the film very well. This is something that I feel I would most definitely change for the final cut.

Overall, I am mostly happy with the fine cut and I hope that I get some positive feedback from it.