A bittersweet finish

I’ve felt things to be pretty awkward this week. It’s the final week before final exports are due so stress level s are high in the air! I have found out that Gery is unhappy with the grade so has taken it upon herself to re-grade the entire film at the last minute. Aisling isn’t sure what the problem with our grade was. We did need to finalise it but I was just waiting for Aisling’s call to get straight onto that.

I was more surprised to find that she has graded over our version instead of starting a fresh one which I’m annoyed about because I needed that grade for work reference and screen grabs. We have looked through the saved vault but it only holds a few days’ worth of material and unfortunately my last input is not recoverable.

On the plus side I have been given one last stint of editorial input to the project, which I’m happy about because it went quite well. I had told them a while ago that I have an idea for the film’s title sequence. There is a shot at the start of the film in which the central couple sign a lease in an estate agent’s. The shot is a close up of the page, which I thought made it a nice canvass for titles. Gery has already done the film title so I asked if I could have a go with a pre title of ‘Coláiste Dhúlaigh/Univestiy of Wolverhampton Presents’. They liked the idea and I’ve just finshed it and I think that thankfully works really well. I say thankfully because it was very hard work. The idea was to have the above title scroll across the page in time with the signatures. They only issue is that Final Cut doesn’t have an effects function for this so I had to improvise. I made a separate text box for each letter (24 in total) and then cut them together precisely so that they when they played in the time line they perfectly synchronized with the signatures on the page. It took me hours and it has screen time of about 10 seconds. Now I know how animators feel…

Hyper link:

Animated opening credits in synch with signatures on page (begins at 00-00-12)

https://vimeo.com/128870570

Back online but not in the cut

The files are now back on the correct drive so editing should be a sight easier to get done now and time is getting short for final edits all round. The girls informed me today when I asked about getting stuck into the fine cut that they have finished picture lock which they must have only done within the last couple of days. I have to say I am disappointed that they didn’t let me know. It’s not that I want to insist on any input or anything and what ever cut they want is their choice but I do thing it’s a bit crazy to have an independent editor and not to even ask their opinion on the final cut. I certainly didn’t let my editor’s viewpoint go amiss and I would especially consider fresh eyes essential at this more pressurized stage.

Anyway, Aisling and I have begun the colour grade so that will probably be my last role on the film before it’s handed over for the sound mix. 

Some more stalling!

Trying to get editing done this week has proved to be a little frustrating. It appears the newly shot material has been accidentally saved to one of the Mac hard drives in the edit suites instead of the portable Lacey drive each film has been assigned. As a result all of the new material is offline whenever access is not possible in that particular edit suite.

I hope this problem gets corrected soon as I have lost some good editing periods I had hoped to avail of between phases in my own postproduction schedule. I’ve let Aisling know but the problem is persisting. I’ve tried to reconnect the files myself with the help of Natasha (our resident technical guru) but that proved not possible without knowing exactly where have been saved to. So until this issue is unfortunately solved there is not much editing I can do.

A little stalling

It turns out that Aisling and Gery have planned to shoot some extra footage as they feel it’s necessary to strengthen the story. Looking over the existing rough cut I feel it’s hard to progress it further without this new material, so I feel I need to wait until they come back with the footage in order to put the edit into the next gear. I was in the same boat with my own film only last week, as we also needed to get some necessary pickup shots and our edit also hit a slow patch until we got those scenes/shots filmed.

It just goes to show how important the rhythm and flow of the editing process is when progressing the narrative can slow down so much even just waiting for a few minutes worth of necessary material.