Editing Day 6

Today was more eventful. But not in a good way. The editing of the scenes are now done except for the music that needs to be inserted into some of the shots. And there's one shot of five red cards that we can't find for some reason anywhere on the Mac. But we did located it on the tape when we viewed it with the camera. And it was by some other footage that I had never seen on the computer at all, so I guess there were a few things that weren't transferred to the computer for some reason. So I'll have to do that tomorrow. I'll probably stay after to burn to DVD. Oh and another issue - the music would not import into final cut express. It was really weird. But tonight, I bought the songs we need and burned them to CD, so hopefully they will work tomorrow. They BETTER work tomorrow! Oh, and if I have time, I'd like to fix some of the audio on the clips. There's just a couple of areas where it's hard to hear the person speaking, so I'd like to turn up the volume of those segments. I watched a tutorial on how to do that, so hopefully I'll still remember tomorrow so I can do that. Oh yeah, I'll be coming in for first period again tomorrow.

Editing Day 5

So, today I edited some more. I came in first period too. Unfortunately I couldn't stay after because I couldn't drive to school today because the truck that my dad usually drives is currently out of service, so my dad is driving the car I usually drive, meaning I had to bus it home. Anyway, the whole DVD on one Mac and editing on another is working out really well. I'm really not sure how to make this entry longer. Just edited - made cuts, deleted stuff, etc.

Editing Day 4

The only problem I currently have with this course is the fact that I can not take home a laptop to use to edit. I know that this decision comes from people higher up on the managerial totem pole, but I really wish they would change their minds on this decision. If they did, I certainly think that the quality of post-production work would increase. And it would be easier on the students as well. In the current arrangement when editing is only done during class time (or during study halls or after school, but let's just consider the class time for this example). So, each class is 42 minutes long, but when you consider set-up and put-away time of the laptop and extraneous equipment, a student may only have about 30 minutes of actual editing time. In a five day week, that's only a total of 2.5 hours. And plus, when a student starts each day, time is wasted determining exactly where in the editing process the student was etc. Therefore, 2.5 hours is actually less. Oh, and we must consider the fact that the majority of students taking this course are not proficient in final cut express. Sure, it's not that hard to develop a working knowledge of this program, but there is a definite learning curve. And without having more time to spend learning the program itself, it's harder for the student (especially in the allotted time period) to do anything more than the very basics. That doesn't include any visual effects or visual corrections that would enhance the video greatly. If students could take these laptops home, in one weekend a student could easily have ample time to finish the entire project, including time to watch tutorials about final cut express to help with the more advanced aspects of it. (Slightly separately, it would also be nice to be able to spend more time learning about the different functions of the camera itself to help with shooting. There actually is some opportunity for that though since we can check out the camera.) Anyway, it would really be awesome if, in future years, students could check out the laptops. Oh, and also, it's not like the laptops shouldn't be checked out because they are so expensive, because all of the other equipment we check out certainly totals approximately the same amount as the laptop.

Oh, and as to today's work, I did some more editing. Kyle brought in the DVD today. We played that on one Mac and I edited on another so I can see exactly how the scenes fit together and everything.

Editing Day 3

Sooo, did some more editing today. Got all of the clips into as close to the right order as I can remember without seeing the DVD. We don't have the DVD today, but hopefully we will have it tomorrow or Monday so I can really match up everything as closely as possible to the real thing.

Editing Day 2

This was the first real day of pure editing. I got some good work done. Editing seems to be getting easier with each successive movie I work on as I get more and more familiar with final cut express. I still wouldn't call myself proficient yet, as there's lots of capabilities of fce that I have no where near uncovered. Anyway, today I put most of the clips in order and selected our best take for each shot.

Editing Day 1

Today wasn't exactly an editing day as much as it was a transferring footage to the computer day. Therefore, there's really not much to write about. We had two separate tapes this time since we used two different cameras to shoot certain shots so the audio and visual between the two angles of shots would have more continuity. This simply meant that transferring the content to the computer took longer. We imported one tape during class, then Kyle and I came in after school to import the footage on the second tape.

Third and last day of shooting

Today we all met at my house again to complete filming. We had quite a few scenes to film, but everything was still set up from the last time we shot, and we just quickly shot the rest of the scenes. One thing I forgot to mention last time we shot (but it applies for both times): Because the sheets only covered the back wall, we ended up just rotating the table and chairs anytime we needed a specific group of people to be shot together with that dark background. This way, it should look like the whole room has dark walls, just like in the actual scene. The long shot probably looks the worst out of all of the shots, since we couldn't hide anything with clever tricks. But it's the best we could do...it's not like we were making the real movie and had a budget big enough to actually shoot in a room that was dark and had all the cool lighting in it that it had.

Shooting Day 2

Today, the entire group and Chelsea (who played the girl in the scene while I did the camera duties) met at my house at 6:30 to shoot as much as we could of the main scene with everyone playing poker. For the props/other scene elements, Evan brought over a poker table (that is, a collapsible top to one, which we flipped over to the dark side and placed on top of Conrad's foldable card table). Someone brought over cards with red backs and poker chips. I got 4 or 5 empty (yes, they already were empty) green beer bottles and took the wrappers off that identified them as actual beer bottles to substitute for the light blue beer bottles used in the actual scene. Also, since we filmed this in my finished basement that has light colored walls, Eli brought over dark blue sheets that we put up to cover the walls. We also covered the fluorescent light that was right above where we put the table so the room would be darker. (Because my basement has a drop ceiling, it was relatively easy to lift up the tiles and tuck the sheet into them to keep the sheets where we needed them. Lastly, we covered the other fluorescent light with the black bag that encased Evan's poker table top to again make the room darker.

Then, I looked through the camera settings, and found perfect settings to put the camera on. Firstly, I put the camera in "cine" mode. This made the room seem even darker. Also, it got rid of the fuzziness that we saw while shooting our last film that resulted from low light situations. Basically, it made everything look a LOT better. This is definitely a setting I would recommend telling other people about in the future to help with the quality of the films. Also, I adjusted the brightness a bit, and turned "my colors" off. We plugged in the smaller light (I forgot what it is called.) Then we were good to go. We ended up getting about 1/3 of that scene shot in the two or so hours we met today.

The real "shooting day 1"

Soooo, dailies didn't work out. I'm not really sure why, but our group just didn't meet on the weekend to shoot. But we're catching up now. Today, most of the group met at Conrad's to shoot the first second scene, which only shows Eli and Conrad as Rusty and Topher, respectively, walking down a hallway talking. I had camera duty, Evan had sound duty, and Kyle was the director. I found out that this scene is actually incredibly hard to shoot, as the best hallway we could find had stairs that turned halfway up. There was barely enough room for the camera to get both Eli and Conrad in the shot when we all got to that landing between the stairs. Even before that, the only way to shoot this in this location was for me to hand-hold the camera while walking backwards up the stairs, then turn backwards, then go up more stairs backwards, while trying to have the camera perfectly still. That was impossible. But, I did what I could. Also, to get the lighting right, I adjusted the camera's brightness, since we couldn't dim the lights in the hallway we were using.

Once we shot that many, many times, starting from many different locations and ending at many different locations, we decided to drive over to the court house (it was around 10:30pm at this point) and shoot the first scene. This just has a lit up building in the background, Eli as Rusty leaning against/sitting on the hood of a car, eating nachos. Conrad as Topher calls his name from the background, and then Eli walks off screen. This shot ended up coming out really good. The hardest part was dealing with the wind, as it was about to start raining. We kind of made a human shield for the mic, and I think the sound will be fine. There will be music over this scene anyway.

Shooting Day 1 (Kind of)

This morning, the majority of our group met at my house with the goal of shooting dailies. However, with all of the AP tests and the Special Olympics going on last week, there were many days where only a few of the group members were actually in class on a given day, so our communication was lacking. By this, I mean that all of us (except Evan because he had a lacrosse game) showed up to my house to shoot, when we realized that it was not Conrad who had the poker table, it was Evan. This meant that we did not have a pivotal prop for the scene, and so we could not shoot what we had planned on shooting. So, instead of shooting, we just rehearsed a little more, and made plans for when we could shoot next so we still will be able to have dailies by Tuesday. However, I will not be able to meet anytime before Tuesday, because I will be out of town starting about an hour from now until Monday night.

Rehearsal (For the scenes from Ocean's Eleven)

Today, we all met at my house to reherse. Since I am the only person not in this film, I personally didn't have much to rehearse, but I provided the rehearsal location, and helped with what other things I could help with. For example, we didn't have enough copies of the script, so I made copies/printed out more copies. After we all had scripts, we all sat in chairs in the order that we actually would in the scene, and did several read-throughs. For today, I did say the line that the girl has in this film, but when we actually shoot, Conrad's girlfriend Chelsea will play that role as I work the camera. Besides read-throughs, we watched the scene several times to see what movements the characters had, what they were doing when not actually speaking, and how they delivered each line.

Burn to DVD Day 2

Yep, sure enough, there was one, simple, seemingly obvious thing that we had neglected to do...click the import button. Sure, it seems obvious now...if you don't import something to that program, nothing will be there. But somehow I guess it seemed like it had already imported itself or something. Either way, thanks to Bill, we were FINALLY able to burn "The Cue" to DVD.

So even though I lost some sleep over this ordeal (by having to get up extra early to make it to school more or less on time) I'm glad that I got to see all the movies from the first period class. I think all the movies are good, and some are surprisingly good, so I'm anxious to put everything up on YouTube so I can watch them again, so I can watch previous ones I haven't seen, and so I can see how far we've all come in our movie making skills.

I guess our movie did end up coming together fairly well in the end, as, at some points in the editing process, it seemed like I would never be done. There definitely are changes I would have liked to have made, (and part of me still wants to make those changes) but, all in all, I think our mini-mini-film noir "The Cue" came out fine.

Editing Day 5/Burn to DVD Day 1

Well, today was supposed to be mainly a burn to DVD day, but since we all thought that would just take a few minutes, I was able to make a few of the changes that I had really wanted to make on Friday. Firstly, thanks to a suggestion made by Conrad, I was able to partially fix the really ugly jump cut towards the beginning of the film. I say partially, because it's still not exactly what I would have wanted, but it's waaaayyy better than I had left it. Secondly, I put in the transition that I had thought of on Friday (although I must give Evan credit for this as well, as I had forgotten that I had been meaning to do this until Evan suggested it) to make a smooth transition, showing an elapse of time between the phone conversation and the pool/billiards scene. There are still a few shots that are kind of awkward because of their silence, but my group seems to like them, as their awkwardness reflects the tone of the film. We also figured out how to add title credit slides. The credit slide looks good, but we had had some issues with the speed of the title slide. The title is spelled out letter by letter like a typewriter would, but they appear excessively slow. We still are not able to figure out the correct way to speed this up, but, thanks to Conrad, we did do a little bit in a roundabout way. It's not perfect, but we didn't have more time to make it perfect.

So then to what we thought would be the easy part...the burning of the DVD. Everything seemed to be working - we picked out the title screen and everything once we exported the film to iDVD, but we agreed to have Conrad come in during 7th to actually burn it, as we were out of time for the period. Long story short, apparently that didn't work, and when I came in after school, it didn't work either. So, I'll have to drag myself out of bed bright and early tomorrow morning and get my butt in 1st period IB film and hope that somebody will point out the one little thing that we had overlooked for the past hour and a half.

Editing Day 4

I need more time!!! I came in today during the first period film class, and got some good editing done. Then, during the regular 5th period class, I pretty much finished the editing. There's no title page or credits, and there's one problematic cut in particular, where I'd like to double the amount of time one of the clips lasts, but if I drag it out, it ads this other random clip to it that I don't want, because then it basically creates an ugly jump cut. That's the biggest problem. And there's another section with no speech, but it is necessary for the storyline, so the silence is awkward. I'd like to add a transition, because I have a plan in my head of how to do it so it won't be awkward, but, unfortunately, there's no time. And I'd like to do other random fine tuning stuff, but I guess I can't, unless the deadline is extended somehow. Or unless I buy a mac with final cut express on it this weekend, since I do have the current version saved on my flash drive, but that's not gonna happen. Or I could make a trip to the apple store and pretend to peruse through the macs while I actually connect my flash drive and edit my movie, but that's not gonna happen either.

Editing Day 3

Today, I'd say, is the first day where I'm starting to be able to see the individual movie clips coming together as one fluid movie, for lack of a better term. I'm not exactly sure why this movie's editing seems to be going so slowly and not as fluidly as I would like, but, especially today, I was finally getting a rhythem down, so editing went much quicker. Nonetheless, an hour of editing goes by so darn quickly! It's not always easy to stay totally and completely focused on something for a length of time, but when working on something I deem as a "project", and especially when this project is a multimedia type of project and I get to use the computer, I really become a perfectionist, and will willingly work for quite a long time on it in order to make it pretty much perfect. I want to do this on this project, but there's a much tighter time constraint this time, so I hope that I can get it up to my own personal standards by the due date.

Thanks to the conjoined efforts of you, Mrs. Sutherland, and Kyle, we were finallly able to figure out how to insert the voiceover sound to the clip we wanted it in. That seemed to be my biggest obstacle, and now that that's accomplished, it should be all downhill from here. (Downhill in a good sense.)

Somewhere in today's process, however, something got slightly messed up, as some of the visual parts of the clips are about a frame or two shorter than their corresponding audio clip. The audio clips butt cleanly up against one another, but the screen goes black for about a frame, making the cut quite noticible. I'm dealing with it, but it's just one more nuissance. It was probably my fault somehow anyway though, so it's fine.

Editing Day 2

Today I finished separating all of our footage into chunks for each shot, and actually was able to do some real editing. I also came after school for a little over and hour to get some more editing done. However, I still need to re-learn how to extract the audio on some of the clips so we can put that over some footage for a voice over. I still like editing, but, at the moment, I'm feeling a little pressured from our time constraint and rapidly approaching deadline. This movie's editing is much more in-depth than than "the pencil" movie's editing was. But that's ok...it just means that our final product will look much better and will give us a greater sense of accomplishment.

I'm watching tutorials of Final Cut Express right now to hopefully answer the questions I have and to generally familiarize myself with it as much as I can to make sure I am editing in the most efficient way. So far, I've realized that, right from the beginning, I don't really think I am, since all of the clips automatically went onto the timeline just by importing our footage, whereas, on the tutorial I'm watching, it seems like it first went to a list box over to the side, so the clip can be trimmed before it's put on the timeline, and so multiple takes won't be on the timeline all at once. Note to self: turn the snapping button ON!!! One little annoyance that I've had today was getting the clips exactly together. I didn't remember having this problem on "the pencil", and now I know how to fix it, as long as I still remember this info by tomorrow. Ah ha! And use Shift + delete, rather than just delete, to keep all of the clips together when I delete a clip in the middle. Wow, these tutorials really help! I'm starting to see why Final Cut Express is such a credible product because of all the different things it can do to enhance a movie. Hopefully I'll retain at least some of what I just learned. The only problem is, I'm not sure if I'll have time to really fine tune our movie with this impending due date. Too bad I don't have a Mac. There's no chance I could borrow a mac book for the weekend to really fine tune the movie, and learn more about Final Cut in general, is there???

Editing Day 1

So, today was our first editing day. Since I am the designated editor, I personally had control of the Mac. Since iMovie doesn't seem to want to cooperate, we're using Final Cut Express, which is fine, since I've never actually personally used iMovie, and since I did use Final Cut on the first movie of the year. Therefore, I'm somewhat familiar with Final Cut, and, after 5 or so minutes, I re-familiarized myself with it, and was able to easily get through the today's grunt work, which consisted of cutting two large segments (one for each day of shooting) into much smaller segments for each take. I think it'll take only a few more minutes to finish dividing the footage, so I should be able to devote most of tomorrow to actual edtiting.
I guess each of these entries should be about two paragraphs long, but there isn't really much to say about today, and the last entry was double the required length, so I hope this will due.
P.S. Here's the link to Achmed the Dead Terrorist. The first 3-ish minutes are the best in my opinion.

Shooting Day 2

Today, St. Patrick's Day, (the reason for the green font color) we finished shooting our mini-mini-film noir. It took us about an hour, making total shooting time about 2 hours. Neither Mack nor Kyle could make it today, so, with Even and Eli acting, Conrad and I were left to the camera and sound. We took turns being the camera operator and the mic operator, so we each shot about half of today's work, meaning that we each shot about about a quarter of the total movie.

Being the camera operator was surprisingly fun. I was able to put more input into how the shots were shot, as previously, I would occasionally notice some kinds of shots that I would rather have another way, or the consensus was that the shot was good, and I basically agreed, but I would want to tweak one little detail or something. When it comes to things such as this that I will label under "projects" I tend to be nit-picky. But I don't want to drive everyone crazy, so I limit how much I ask the camera operator to try the shot slightly differently if it's fine the way it is. Anyway, I'll be able to apply my nit-pickyness when I'm editor next week. Editing is my favorite part of the process.

Not that I'm trying to imply that the footage I shot was better than the rest, or anything like that. Not at all. I just enjoyed having this responsibility and being able to execute a pan exactly how I wanted in terms of speed and exact start and end position etc. Our group as a whole came up with the placement and movement of the camera, I just finally had the opportunity to personally initiate them today. And I will also single out Conrad in saying that he had some especially creative camera angle ideas that I think will really make the film look extra good.

So anyway, I think we got some really good footage today. We messed around with angles and lighting even more than we had the first day, so the footage should be quite interesting, assuming that it will still make sense, which I'm quite sure it will. Because we did this, we ended up not shooting exactly how the storyboard had been drawn up, but I think it's even better, since we realized that there wouldn't have been as much variation.

Shooting Day 1

I just got back from Evan's house where we met as a group for the first time to shoot some scenes. Surprisingly, we actually got a lot done - about half of our entire mini-mini-Film Noir, as I like to refer to it. We all met at Evan's at about 3:00. Well, Kyle unfortunately couldn't make it today since he couldn't get out of work, and Conrad had to come a little late since he had to pick up his brother from college and bring him back home. Nonetheless, we got a lot done, and it went quite smoothly as well.

I'd have to say that the hardest part about shooting today was working out the lighting. We didn't check out a light, so we used a flood light instead. It ended up providing nice shadowing, but it took a little bit of finessing to find the proper placement so there would not be an overwhelming bright spot from the source of the light. I helped to figure that out. I also did some camera work, some sound work, a voice over, and continuously paid attention to any continuity issues that may arise, and fixed any I saw before they became full fledged issues.