I've been editing

After wrapping all the filming I needed to do, I can finally sit down and put this thing together. Kind of at least. What I mean by that is that I've already edited most of scene 1 and scene 3 before I official sat down to edit. Those scenes required elements that would play on the TV, so I already had all the TV elements I needed when I official began.

I began setting up the footage and project files on Friday, so that I’d be ready for Saturday. I thought I’d start with the end since I thought that scene had the most moving parts and potentially complex part of the whole timeline. It involved TV scenes yes, but also involved a live action portion and needed to hit. One of the biggest challenges I knew going in was that the sequence with Trent in the house was filmed before the parts of me reacting to the TV. Not to mention the live action scene with Trent was filmed in a more or less rushed manner since Connor’s parents really wanted him home. As a lighting guy, I really didn’t like how the lighting changes between the two half's, but I had to figure out a way to ease it in.

The shot of me reacting to the empty scene was filmed twice during the two filming sessions, but the version I filmed along side with Connor had a leg up on the other more visually interesting shot; his hand actually pulled on my shoulder. I first tried to see if I can make a projection mask over the shot with Connor, but that went nowhere. In a gamble I began to mask Connor’s hand out of it’s shot to put over the other shot. After some time I got enough frames, overlayed it, and IT WORKED. Sure I had to trim the clip to end before the hand actually pulled on the shoulder, but the effect was there.

It was also around this time that I realized I made an oopsie, I forget to record Connor saying the line “I’m not telling you” that was meant to ease in the viewer into his big monologue. With no way of refilming, I tweaked the script and timeline a bit to have Eric berate Trent with the same question, and have him snap. He’d also begin with the “Because you’re no one” and then pause for a reaction for eric before diving deep into the monologue and rest of the scene.

I edited the rest of the scene and then slapped an adjustment layer that changed the hue of the more purple raw footage to be more blue. And then I realized I needed sound… I got on freesound.org and began looking for all kinds of sounds, clicking, channel changing, and a whole bunch of sounds for when Trent presses the remote. I ended up downloading so much I made a folder to to house all of them. I also added some brown noise for ambience and got a song off of Epidemic sounds that worked surprisingly well with the already edited scene.

I then moved on to the 2nd scene at the train station. I first synced up all the audio with the videos and began to make a line edit. I then made sure the match cut from the first scene would work with the one in the second (it did). I then went on freesound.org got some more sound effects and continued to the next scene.

It was around this time that I finally got the jingle and VO for the commercial, so I began to finalize the third scene. I first added a J-cut to the start of the scene to serve as a sound bridge from the 2nd scene to the 3rd. I then went to freesound.org to get sounds for the thunder and powering off.

4TH SCENE LET’S GO! It was a pretty similar workflow to the 2nd scene with syncing audio and video and then making a line edit before going to my new favorite website freesound.org. What was different though, was that I began to look through the preset LUTs in premiere to see if I liked any of the visual looks. I wanted something with blues (for the brand) but also vibrate since the scene did take place during gold hour. I found one and then copied it to the 2nd scene only to remember that the scene didn’t take place during gold hour so it looked weird. Luckily I had known of another LUT from the first search that worked well.

With all the individual scenes being finalized I started another timeline, promptly title THE TIMELINE with everything to get an idea of the total runtime. Right now I’m at 8:03 not including end credits, so I’m likely going to email my advisor about it to see if that’s still fine. My main goal at this time is to get as much feedback as I can before the big due date, so we’ll see how that goes.

P.S.