Drama Blog: Editing Process

As I was on the fine cut stage of the edit now, all I had already structured the whole narrative and got every clip almost exactly where it should be so I started by exporting for Luke, the sound designer, to start working on his score for the film. After doing this I started by continuing where I left off with the rough cut which was testing out effects that could be used to connote the instability of the character John's memory. After a while of looking through them all and collaborating with the director, we settled on one that worked effectively and gave of the right connotations without being too over the top, called radial blur.

Using radial blur effect for a signifier of memory loss.

We liked this because it distorted the image in a way that it wasn't impossible to make out what the image actually was, but still made it hard to see any of the details within the image, much like when someone is struggling to remember the fine details of something. I used this effect over the first dream sequence at the start of the film, and then at the very end of the film when John is getting his memory wiped. To do this effect at the end, I had to keyframe it to show the progression of the 'treatment' and do it slowly enough so that the audience understood what was happening.

Keyframing radial blur effect.

I also needed to mask some of the set in the morgue scene to make it look like the body wasn't just on a bunch of tables lined up and to make it more like a surreal dream like sequence which is what it is supposed to be. To do this I used the spot colour correction effect and then the draw tool and just turned the contrast right down so the legs of the tables were no longer visible.

Shot before spot colour correction effect.

Shot after, showing the shape of mask effect.

Doing all of these effects on a big sequence like the one we have causes Media Composer to slow down and drop frames during playback which is very annoying and can cause misjudgement on the editors part, so I rendered the effects across the whole sequence to make it play back smoother and take the strain of the computers memory.

Rendering effects across the whole sequence to my hard drive.

The next major thing to do in the fine cut stage of editing is the colour grading and colour correction. This was going to be one of the bigger jobs on the fine cut as the sequence was still just under 10 minutes long and comprised of over 100 clips, most of which would need at least some colour correction done to them. I started from the beginning and used the colour correction mode on Media Composer to match the colour, brightness and contrast of each clip side by side.

Colour grading each clip side by side.

In the first sequence, all I did was turn up the contrast a bit to make the images look a bit more surreal to play with the dazed and confused performance and overall surrealism of the scene. In some of the scenes, due to multiple light sources or choice of exposure, there were certain areas that needed altering and others that didn't. To get around this I, once again, used the spot colour correction tool to draw an area around the spot that needed changing, and then used either the contrast, saturation or grade to normalise it with the rest of the shot.

Spot contrast alteration for over exposed sky. (before)

After altering the contrast slightly.

Shot before colour correction.

Drawing a mask around areas in need to colour correction.

Shot after saturation and colour correction alteration.

This process was very fiddly and took quite a bit of time to execute effectively so I was thankful that not all shots needed to be graded in this manner. The majority only needed some normalisation with the rest of the shots in the scene which was simple enough to do using the colour curves.