Out O' Date - Rough Cut and Fine Cut (30/04/13)

Today, I got on with finishing the rough cut for my Out O' Date project. I started off by taking the feedback that Chris had previously given me to improve the film. The first thing that I changed was the entrance of the car. When the car entered originally, the two shot of Tony and Alf and also the close up of Alf before he turned around didn't seem right. The two shot went on for too long and in the close up it looked like Alf was waiting for his cue to turn around. I cut these shots down and decided to add the long shot with the car in the foreground between them as the manager closed the car door.

The second piece of feedback that I took into account was the sound throughout the film. The two original opening shots didn't have any sound recorded with them so I added an atmos track over them that would suite them. I noticed in a lot of the other shots I could hear birds chirping in the sound so in the atmos track I used I made sure that there were birds chirping. The track that I used was recorded during my documentary project in Norfolk Park. I thought that the sound fit the shots very well. 

After adding these changes, I noticed that my sequence was only 01:18. I wanted to make the sequence longer so I looked back to the script and decided to carry on the sequence with what came next in the script. I found the footage for the next scene and added it into my project and renamed the files in the same format that I had renamed the first batch of files. 

I then started on the assembly of the next scene. I did the assembly in the assembly sequence that I had created first so then once I had done it, I could copy and paste the files into the rough cut sequence and do the rough cut in the rough cut sequence. I didn't have many problems whilst doing the assembly of the scene, how, one problem that I found was that there was only one close up shot of the lady at the door whilst she is talking and her starts smiling as she says she's going to get a bag of peas for Alf. I didn't like this shot but thought it would have looked very good. In the end, I decided that I would overlay the audio from the shot over a shot of Tony carrying Alf to the front door. After assembling the scene, I copied the sequence into the rough cut sequence to start the rough cut. 

In the rough cut of the scene, I started by trimming some of the shots down. The first shot that I made shorter was the opening shot to the scene where the milk float pulls up outside of the house. I wanted to make sure that the milk float was almost stopping when the shot started because I thought that it would have gone on for too long otherwise. 

Another major thing that I changed in the rough cut was again, the shot of the lady at the door. I left the shot as it was but whilst listening to the sound, I noticed that somebody was coughing in the background whilst she was talking. I tried to cut this cough out however, it was very noticeable that I had cut it out and it didn't work very well. I then decided to go through the clips where the lady could be heard talking and tried to add this audio over the shot. In the end, I managed to find a piece of audio that worked well with the piece so I placed it over the shot and synced it up and I thought that it worked very well. 

After making sure that the sound was alright, I duplicated the entire sequence and called the new sequence '03 Fine Cut 1' to start the fine cut. I started off by watching through the film again to see if there was anything that I noticed needing changing. One thing that I didn't like was the way that I cut to black for a second between the two scenes. I wanted to find a way to make these two scenes fit together without the cut to black in the middle. The way I did this was by overlaying the audio of the milk float pulling up over the shot of Tony lifting Alf up at the end of the first scene. I then brought the rest of the film forward to fit the two scenes together and this worked well. 

After changing this transition and trimming shots down to the correct length, I went through the entire sequence and listened to the sound and added audio crossfades to all of the shots, even if they were only 1 frame long, to make sure I could eliminate all of the clips and pops in the sound. 

Finally, I added the title and a credit to the end of the film before finishing the film and deciding to leave it for the day and have another look at it tomorrow to see if there was anything that I thought might be changing.