Liverpool Post-Production

Rough Editing Structure

It was at this phase in the project where I really contributed to my group, I spent many hours with the group’s director Sebastian Wray sorting through the footage, arguing over what to put in and what not and the overall structure of the documentary.  By the time the crit for the project came round we had a three minute video to show for it, the comments we received in this session were incredibly helpful. We were told that the idea and footage we had were both really good but when questioned about what we desired the end result of the documentary to be, we were unsure and each had different answer, our tutor explained that this uncertainty showed in our film and what we had was more of an assembly than a rough cut. With these comments in mind we all sat down and discussed what we wanted to achieve in the documentary and what footage fitted that end best, by the end of the session I had a rough editing structure to follow.



The rough cut of my documentary

A few days after the crit I went into the editing suit on my own and worked throughout the day until I had created a rough edit for our documentary. This wasn’t a particular impressive edit although the structure and cuts were done to a good quality I hadn’t done any colour correcting and our original sound editor Tyrese Thomas had taken a leave due to personal reasons which we had all been aware would happen, as I wasn’t aware of anyone else confident in sound editing in our group I took the liberty of syncing all the audio clips with the footage in the rough edit to help out the new sound editor. This initial edit and the more final edit after took a lot longer than they should have due to a problem with our footage which neither I nor the technicians were able to sort which meant all our footage had to be manually rendered when placed into Final Cut Pro, this was a nuisance rather than a hindrance although I estimate that it probably double the editing time for this project.

After my group had been shown the rough cut and had some time to think over it, we met up to begin the final edit. The first part of this consisted of me listening to peoples suggestions and ideas and then implementing them based on the discussions that followed and whether or not I agreed that it was the best change to make to the edit, for the most part there wasn’t any real problems with doing this but there were some dispute between me and the director on what was best for the documentary which often ended in me being overruled when we couldn’t come to a reasonable compromise.

An in process Colour correction,
you can also see the vivid hue problem I mention

I also set about colour correcting our footage, this was a fairly difficult process as firstly I had never done this on Final Cut and secondly when I re-rendered the clip post colour correction it then became darker than it originally had been and hues became more vivid, this often resulted in slightly red looking grass, because of this strange result of the rendering problem  we had I was forced to over colour correct with this error in mind so that when I rendered the footage it didn’t become too dark or vivid unfortunately this was unavoidable in some footage. Once the footage was all ordered, colour corrected and approved by the rest of the group I passed the edit over to Marcus Owramenko to work on the sound editor. In all fairness to him although he didn’t seem incredibly confident in fulfilling the role he did a great job with the sound design and even went a step further and showed an alternative way to edit the end of the film which we ended up going with. I then set about adding name and titles to the interviewees as well as a title and some fade in/outs closer to the end, the final addition to the documentary were the credit unfortunately by this point I was the only remaining member of my group in the edit suit and I was unable to contact Marcus for his student number so it does not appear in the credits besides his name like everyone else's.