Greetings! After having two back-to-back and very jam-packed days of filming, editing today was quite the hefty task! As you might have already expected, the first step was running the clips through iMovie. That application has to be my favorite one-stop shop for piecing clips together and testing out different transitions before moving on to the more complicated platforms like Davinci Resolve 18. When working in iMovie, I was able to take care of transitioning between cuts during the morning sequence. By slowly sliding through each clip, I was able to find the perfect moment to combine the shots in which the primary subject is shown listening to the voice recorder from a medium shot framing to when they are captured with the use of an over-the-shoulder shot and then back again when the message closes off to show their reaction. Furthermore, before switching programs, I also worked on tweaking the transition between the conclusion of the bathroom scene to the office scene by aligning the hand placements to make it seem as though the motion was completed from one scene to the next, effectively introducing an action-match cut into the mix. As such, I was able to avoid awkward pauses, moving on to sizing down the length of shots in some cases, and for smoother transitions, sometimes extending the length of some clips, all in an effort to meet our given time constraint of five minutes. At this time, we have about two minutes and thirty seconds left of filming leeway for our last few scenes. Once I had ordered all of the clips that we had presently available, I uploaded copies of them onto Google Drive, downloaded them onto my laptop, and booted up DaVinci Resolve 18. The first thing I did when I opened up the application, in fact, my utmost priority, was finding a way to back up my work. You can truly never be too careful, and it's too late in the game to run the risk of losing any hard work I put in going forwards, so I did repeatedly save my progress every couple of minutes or so once I had made any major changes. The platform's new update has made it more user-friendly, but my previous experience working with the software allowed me to navigate the settings and put in my preset saving preferences, as I have shown below.
Before continuing forward and making actual alterations to what we currently have of our short film, I did confer with my teammates and we decided that it would be best to leave the tonal and color scheme editing for the film at the very end that way each scene had a uniform look instead of having to work with presets as I had originally intended. I began my work on DaVinci Resolve 18 by inputting the scores I had at my disposal. That meant integrating the score for the morning scene, pre-date scene, as well as the final scene of our short film, the last of which was composed by an actual band, Jayomi, who as you may recall, gave us permission to utilize their song. All of said scores would also give my team and I the innate opportunity to minimize ambient background noises that detract attention away from our short film and its message. When it came to including the final song, I found that our earlier decision to have the television audio turned down by the primary subject within the clip, allowed me to capitalize on the relative lack of sound and gradually introduce the melody. In that same scene, I need to overlap that song with the audio of the police officer stating their presence (courtesy of our primary subject's father). To do so, I employed the amazing capabilities of the DaVinci Resolve 18 program, which allowed me to lower the volume of the song and increase that of the officer's voice to ensure its intelligibility. In the meantime, one of my teammates is continuing to work diligently to provide me with the rest of our necessary scores so that I can later edit them into their respective scenes, as to encapsulate the distinctive tones that they each exude. Incorporating these audios meant that I needed to have them fade seamlessly in and out, matching them the best I could to any dietetic sounds to make their introduction into a shot as natural as possible. Aside from the insertion of said scores, I also worked on including dietetic sound effects, such as the news station jingle, signally to the viewers that the primary subject had turned on their television and was watching the morning news broadcast. This also doubled as a means of avoiding an awkward cut, by acting as a sound bridge between shots. The entire concept of including an originally produced video inside of our own piece of media was something I had wanted to attempt since last year, so being able to see everything start to fall into place and come together was absolutely worth it! As I worked on that sound effect and examined the rest of that news segment clip, I discovered that some of the audio had been cut off before its transfer to DaVinci Resolve 18 from iMovie. In order to avoid a slow upload time from one device to another, I decided to be resourceful and superimposed the last remaining bit of the statement after stripping the full-length clip of its audio. That proved to be the more efficient method in the end.
In terms of the physical improvements I made to the short film, I inserted a fade out to black at the very end of our short film. This final transition will allow the audience to not only fully appreciate the pure masterpiece that the song "metamorphosis" by Jayomi is, but also to experience a complete realization of what had just unfolded on the screen in front of them. Try as I might, I still could not entirely resolve the issue of accounting for the camera movement during the bathroom scene, but I did tilt the screen a bit to attempt to remediate as much as I could and it seems as though it is barely noticeable.
I have included some snippets of my editing process below to give you an insight as to what goes on behind the camera.
Since I had other school work I needed to attend to I was unable to work on making the number twenty-four more noticeable on the alarm clock, blurring out the objects that we were not allowed to move from the background, and covering up the obvious indication that the news segment was created on PowerPoint. Aside from those three things I need to address, in my next editing session, I also intend to work with my team to incorporate the titles to give proper credit to all of the collaborators of this project, as well as to determine the proper font choice, color, and placement to match the tone of our short film.
I think I've done a fair amount of work to call it day and all I can say about these scenes that I've been working with is that "I wanna slice you and dice you(!)" (Post Malone and Young Thug, 2019).
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