RED 2
Post- Production
Over a period of about three to four weeks I set about editing
my film, first of all I took the footage that I had captured on the z1 camera
and painstakingly went through every shot finding things that I thought may
have some relation to my project. I initially knocked all the footage I deemed
usable to around twenty minutes, at which point I began thinking about the idea
of using music to score the final film. The one track I had in my head from the
very start of this project was by Johnny Greenwood called " Prospectors Arrive" and It was
originally part of the soundtrack to the film " There Will Be Blood" ( Dir. P.T. Anderson 2007), I couldn't envision
the film without that scoring it.
Next I started compiling audio snippets and video footage
from various sources. I found a speech
by a young Christian on YouTube which
was titled " young man gives inspirational speech about Jesus" I used excerpts from an interview with
Charles Manson, an interview with Niklas Kvarforth from the aforementioned band
"Shining" whose talks very candidly about his own philosophy on life,
I also used audio snippets from" Terminator 2: Judgement Day " ( Dir.
J. Cameron 1991) and " American Psycho" (Dir. Mary Harron 2000) also I
snuck in some audio from Tony Blair's victory speech from 1997, on their own
they had remained empty statements but once I found images to put them against
they found new meaning. I struck upon the idea of using footage of the concentration
camps in Dachau to use in a specific place
in the film I had managed to get lots of footage from the z1 which showed a
very long high grey wall that ran along the docklands area that reminded me of the military and the notion of
war behind those walls and I decided that with "fitting " dialogue I
would insert footage of the concentration camps with it. This was where I
really started to explore the editing system
and really start to gain the confidence to orchestrate and take control of my
film , I decided to start taking the colour out of the preceding few seconds
and then to gradually make everything dark until it met the footage from Dachau
which i hoped would marry with the colour palette of the footage and the
dialogue. After learning how to sue the key frames and experimented with all
the different effects tools to achieve this, I really felt that I was close to finally
achieving what I had been missing since I started the course and that was
seeing exactly the film on screen as the same one I had in my head.
I really started to play around with the rest of the film,
using all sorts of fades and dissolves, I injected and faded still photographs
into other footage, I even managed to make an animated title card at the beginning, all of which took me a
long time to achieve but I was determined to get this right. I found the audio to be a problem, as I had
ripped it from the internet, so the quality was not always as fantastic as I
had hoped and although I was able to manually adjust the gain wherever needed, I was not able to filter it
out and make it clearer. I could've used " sound soap" to help clear
it up, but sometimes this would've
proved too difficult, for example one of the clips I used already had pre-recorded
music embedded into the track which would've meant turning up the music as well
as the dialogue which would've clashed with the music that I had already chosen.
In the case of the rest of the audio, I felt that I really wanted to use this opportunity
to concentrate on the visuals first and foremost. I thought that as long as you
could understand what was being said, I had achieved my goal. I tried to really concentrate on the cut and
examine every edit until the night before screening, I was literally taking out
single frames that at that late a stage, I really believe that every editing
decision had to count. Due to some of the imagery That I had used, the atmosphere did start to get to me after
awhile, I found myself having to step away from project for a couple of days sometimes
as there was only so many times I could
play with real life footage of dying infants before I got started to feel a bit
peculiar. This helped me to keep up my enthusiasm for the film and kept me engaged
and invested to make the film as good as I could.
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