Rough Cut Feedback

Once our rough cut was finished, the rest of the class watched the video and wrote feedback on areas that were good and areas that needed improvement. Many people agreed that the shots and angles used for the instruments were good and drums were synced to the music the best. The video flows quite well as a whole however there are a few improvements that need to be made and the class did pick up on these.

• To begin, many people said that the lighting was varied throughout the video and this needs to be corrected. The problems we had were that our own lighting was not powerful enough for some shots of the singer and also the light coming through the window was sometimes too bright, obscuring the rest of the shot. Hopefully when we next film the natural lighting will be slightly less, if not we will have to edit the contrast of our shots.

• Our classmates said that we need more shots of the singer looking into the camera as this will create a better connection with the audience. This will be easy to correct and we can refilm the majority of the singer shots.

• It was also suggested that we refilm the opening as it is a bit jolty and we decided this was a good idea because there was a bigger and more interesting stained glass window in the church. 

• Something that many people thought was a problem was the shots of the cello strings. The bow seems to be moving too slow over the strings however the cellist is playing the right tune. Our teacher suggested more shots of the fingers of the cellist and violinist to accompany the close up shots of the strings because this will show the audience the right tune is being played. 

• In some areas we also need to edit the syncing in time with the music.

After the feedback, we are pleased with the result of our rough cut but now know some more aspects we can improve on the easily make our video better. We are refilming in the church again on the 5th of February were we will:

1. Re film the opening using the bigger stained glass window and less jolting

2. Re film singer shots we liked from the rough cut with better lighting

3. Film more shots of singer looking at camera

4. Film a close up of lips with the line ‘all my secrets away’

5. Film more varied shots of strings and fingers

6. Create more energy in chorus

7. Film faster cello shots so they look correct to the audience

Secrets - Rough Cut

Secrets - Rough Cut from Jamie WGSB on Vimeo.

Rough Cut Editing Process

After filming, I began to edit the footage and sync it with the song we had chosen. I used Final Cut on the Apple Macs to do this, and to start with I had to import the footage from the video tapes. After I had imported the clips, it was important to name them so we could tell which sections of footage were which.

The next stage was to import the song into final cut and then lock the audio layer, so that when I began dropping clips into the timeline the music did not split.

The easiest way to apply the footage to the timeline was to go chronologically through the video using our animatic as a guide. I pulled the animatic up alongside our video so that I could tell specific cuts and effect points. At the beginning of our video, we use longer takes and transition effects to reflect the calmer music, instead of the straight cuts we used throughout the rest of the video. you can see from the picture opposite the way we had to drag the fade effect into the space between two clips and then lengthen the fade so that it overlapped both clips it was between. The only other effect other than a fade that we used in the video was an additive dissolve, which gave the transition a glow as two clips overlapped each other.

In order to get the clips into the timeline, I had to play the footage we had taken in the preview box, and then mark in and out points for the few seconds that we wanted to include on our timeline. This allowed me to drag small sections of our original footage into the timeline and sync it easily. Once I had found the clip I wanted, I locked the first layer of video and inserted the clip I had on the above track. This allowed me to get the timings right before dropping it into the track with the rest of the clips.

The hardest part of the process was lip syncing our actor with the song itself. It took a lot of patience in some cases to match the video exactly with the song as sometimes the clips were a fraction of a second out and this was very noticeable on the video.

 After I had the clips on the timeline in the right order, I had to edit the contrast and clolouring of some shots so that they were as light as the other clips. This was particularly difficult to do on Final Cut and the result meant that we would need to re-film some of our shots.