This is it! The Final Cut! The product both Addie and I can be proud of.
Being with us since day one you have seen this project from start to finish. From where we started in January with a vague idea of what genre we wanted our movie to be to now where we have the fully edited opening title sequence of our movie.
There was ups, like when we realized we had enough film and did not have to reshoot, and there were downs, like when our whole editing system began to crash, but there was always fun. Whether we found it in the success of the adaptations we chose to make or in the shots where Addie and I could not stop staring right into the camera, it was always there.
I would like to thank everyone who supported the making of this film. To my little brother who lent us his basketball, my sister who acted as our camera woman, our parents who gave us permission to film in various locations, and our table mates who were always there to listen to us complain and give us advice, thank you.
To Addie, my fellow leading lady and best friend. Thank you for always being open to my ideas and for giving me ideas I would have never thought of. Thanks for being on my team since the beginning.
And last but certainly not least thank you Mr. Engle for guiding us through this whole project. You are the executive producer everyone dreams of having. A producer who is willing to make sacrifices to allow the directors their own methods of creativity, someone who always knows how to push them in the right direction. Without your support this movie would not be nearly as good as we have managed to make it.
I hope you enjoyed seeing us along this journey as much as we have enjoyed our journey to this final product. I will always remember all the great things I learned and the fun memories I had making this title sequence.
So as the movie’s say before the lights turn on and the final credits roll…
In this video reflection I addressed two questions by talking about how my production skills developed and how I integrated technology throughout this project.
The project experienced mostly smooth sailing up until the point I was editing our final cut. That is when two major things happened. One of which was the COVID-19 outbreak leading to school being canceled and me practicing social distancing and being unable to communicate with my partner in person for more than a month. The second major occurrence was the deterioration of my editing system.
Halfway through editing out final cut the DaVinci Resolve editing system began to crash more frequently than I discussed previously on the blog. This made it difficult to complete any major edits and made it even more difficult to save in between these edits.
I was luckily able to export the almost final cut before the whole system crashed and I was unable to return to editing on the program. This is when I turned to Splice for the final phase of editing.
Luckily this just included some minor trimming and the inclusion of credits being added to the title sequence. None of these problems are addressed in the reflection because I chose to focus more on where the majority of our editing took place: DaVinci Resolve.
Here I was able to take videos filmed on the Iphone 7plus and Iphone 11 plus and edit them using color correction, transitions, and various other techniques. The sound and title editing software on this program was some of the best I’ve seen while it was operating correctly and I learned a lot of new things from the software that I can carry into the use of other editing programs.
Of everything I’ve learned about how to plan, produce and edit a movie I think the most important thing would be not being afraid to adapt. I am the type of person that if something goes wrong, I sit there and work to fix that one thing before I move on to the next. What I learned from this project is sometimes when things go wrong, you need to find a different thing to fix it. In other words don’t stop progress for one thing, instead never stop moving. Don’t be afraid to jump in to the next step of your project, you may learn you were more prepared than you thought.
Resources:
DaVinci, in. “Custom Titles in DaVinci Resolve 16.” YouTube, 4 Sept. 2019, youtu.be/YhNzCyhILCE. Accessed 20 Apr. 2020.
Davinci, in. “Titles in Davinci Resolve 16.” YouTube, 6 Sept. 2019, youtu.be/1xrpfGvPqLA. Accessed 20 Apr. 2020.
Day One of Filming. “Day One of Filming.” YouTube, 24 Mar. 2020, youtu.be/cTLsF9DfgvI. Accessed 19 Apr. 2020.
Final Title Sequence. “Final Title Sequence.” YouTube, 19 Apr. 2020, youtu.be/MZeN-ySBgk4. Accessed 19 Apr. 2020.
How to Record Microphone Audio inside DaVinci Resolve 16 – Tutorial. “How to Record Microphone Audio inside DaVinci Resolve 16 – Tutorial.” YouTube, 6 June 2019, youtu.be/fIqkcJVsmrA. Accessed 20 Apr. 2020.
Media Rough Cut. “Media Rough Cut.” YouTube, 25 Mar. 2020, youtu.be/c2FSKTs8shc. Accessed 19 Apr. 2020.
PowerPoint, in. “How to Make Movie Credits in PowerPoint [UPDATED 2019].” YouTube, 31 Aug. 2019, youtu.be/jZVSssH5Nt0. Accessed 20 Apr. 2020.
Problem solved, Davinci resolve 16 not running problem. “Davinci Resolve 16 Not Running Problem. ||Davinci Keeps on Crashing While Opening||Problem Solved.” YouTube, 4 May 2019, youtu.be/C9lhMhVGp6M. Accessed 25 Mar. 2020.
In this reflection I addressed how our product would engage the audience and how it would later be distributed as a real media product.
To do this I used the editing program Splice to record and edit a podcast discussing how I envisioned the brand of our product and how Addie and I would use that brand as a basis for decisions made about the project.
One of these decisions was what production company was going to help us produce the movie.
We decided to choose a production company that was used to producing our brand, style, and genre of movie. Based on our lighthearted brand, dramedy genre and the fact that we were producing an independent film we decided on Searchlight Pictures. A production company with a history of independent film successes with the movies Juno and Little Miss Sunshine.
Speaking of independent film success the decision made for our distribution company discussed in the podcast was also involved successful films such as The Peanut Butter Falcon and I Can Only Imagine. This company is Roadside Attractions, an excellent choice considering they helped distributed the highest grossing independent films of both 2018 and 2019.
The brand of our movie aiming to provide insight into the realities of life in a bright and happy way helped us to develop important themes like coming of age, newfound independence, and school life.
These major themes helped us to determine our target audience of female teens. While male teens could also be included in this group the main characters in this film are teenage girls, so girls are more likely to relate to the characters, themes, and jokes made in the movie.
Because of this primarily teen audience the marketing for this movie, as discussed in the podcast, will be mostly present over social media on platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and snapchat.
In my next and final reflection, I will be addressing the technology used within this project and how my skills developed over the course of this project.
Resources:
Big Brother – Trust No One. “Big Brother – Trust No One.” YouTube, 14 July 2017, youtu.be/d14TUB9zFzY. Accessed 19 Apr. 2020.
Night Time Sound Effect. “Night Time Sound Effect.” YouTube, 21 Sept. 2014, youtu.be/vDahBTdgaMk. Accessed 19 Apr. 2020.
Reality TV Music (Drama) – Production Music – Highlight Montage. “Reality TV Music (Drama) – Production Music – Highlight Montage.” YouTube, 29 Dec. 2014, youtu.be/xx9uLGbbJNI. Accessed 19 Apr. 2020.
Yes I know you are anxiously waiting for that final “product Addie and I can be proud of” and trust me it is coming, I just wanted to take this time to reflect on the work we have accomplished.
In this reflection I focused on how our product challenged conventions and how it represents social groups and issues.
As you know our genre is a dramedy, which means its conventions are a mixture between the conventions of a drama and a comedy. Dramas are known for presenting realistic characters in conflict with themselves, others, or a force of nature while comedies often work to hide emotions as well as be energetic.
In order to add dramatic conventions into our title sequence we developed the conflict between Bess and Addie through aspects like costume, color correction, match on action shots and blocking.
Other aspects such as music are also common in dramas and we used this to establish contrast between the beginning of the opening title sequence and the end. This is because the majority of our comedy genre conventions are displayed at the end of the title sequence with our use of sarcasm and exaggeration within dialogue.
In this video I also talked about our representation of women and how our depiction of the two girls in the movie as being able to go off on their own, play sports, and go to school to become doctors presents women as being strong, active, and independent.
This video reflection was created using the Splice video editor app for Apple IOS devices. After experiencing additional problems with the editing system used to edit our rough cut I decided to turn to this reliable program. Since this program is run on my Iphone it made it easier to upload our videos and take screen recordings directly from the device.
In my next post I will be providing additional reflections on our final title sequence in the form of a podcast.
“Every movie I make teaches me something. That’s why I keep making them.”
Clint Eastwood
I can learn a lot from the movies I’ve made. That is why I am taking the time to break down my rough cut and determine what worked and what didn’t.
In rewatching my rough cut I feel the video did not convey the overall plot of the movie as simply as I hoped it would. When it came to editing I became so fixated on using the film we had that I lost sight of the big picture.
In short the rough cut did not play as a film opening and it made the audience work too hard. My intentions were to just ease the audience into the storyline but I found after watching the rough cut that it was difficult to grasp what was going on in the movie.
That is why below I will be listing all of the improvements I plan to make in the final cut of the film.
Frame
There is a lot of things that need to be improved for a final cut. One being the frame of the film. As you can see in the YouTube video there is a larger black frame around the whole film. This is an error I realized only after exporting the film to YouTube. I believe it is caused by a poor choice of aspect ratio, which may have occured while I changed the resolution of the video just before exporting. (To avoid lag I edit in a lower resolution and then change to a higher resolution before exporting) . Either way this is something that needs to be addressed and I will be doing research on before exporting our final cut.
Titles and Credits
Another major correction that needs to be made is the title and end credits. While they are functional they do not resemble that of a professional film. In some instances you will even notice that the title runs off the screen.
I plan to find resources from other editors who use DaVinci resolve and see how they edit their titles to look professional. I will be also researching the proper structure and layout of end credits. As you can seen our end credits are simple, large, and take a long time to present on screen.
By researching I hope to find a way of presenting our credits in a more efficient way that gives proper credit to everyone who worked on the film.
Sound
As you can hear when listening to the rough cut I did not spend a lot of time editing sound. There is no ambient sound on clips with music and too much ambient sound on clips with dialogue.
This way of structuring sound makes it seem more like a music video than a film opening. I plan to fix this through the use of ADR. I will be rerecording ambient sound as well as “cleaning” sound from the original video clips to provide the proper background noises for scenes containing music.
For scenes containing dialogue I plan to use voice over and repeat the lines I say on screen in a studio setting in the hopes of creating a cleaner sound.
With these corrections being made, along with the inclusion of video clips I mentioned “running out of room for” in my last rough cut post I hope to transform this messy rough cut into a product Addie and I can both be proud of.
“I directed a movie and now, I’m going to do the editing.”
Salma Hayek
Shortly after I posted my blog about the DiVinci Resolve editing system and how it was the perfect fit for our film a lot of problems began to arise. Technology always seems to be ironic in the least delightful ways. But I was determined to persist with using the system because of the amount of work I had already completed on it. I became determined, as Salma Hayek is, to edit the film I had helped to direct.
The first problem that arose was the system crashing. This occurred most often when I was first trying to load the system, when I was opening a video to edit, or when I was trying to use a complicated editing feature such as color correction or sound mixer.
The process of reopening the program after it had crashed was incredibly tedious, especially because there was no automatic save feature. I gained the habit of manually saving after every major edit I preformed and even utilized a keyboard short cut in order to do so (ctrl+s).
Soon this problem became more than tedious as the program began to not open at all. This was incredibly frightening because if I could not open the program I could not retrieve my videos or the edits that I had made to them. Before completely starting over and downloading a new editing software (yes I was considering starting completely over despite the rough cut being complete) I turned to YouTube yet again for help.
Luckily many YouTubers, who are more experienced both in video editing and software development, use this same editing software and had experienced the same problem. After watching just two videos I had found out what to do to fix my problem.
The best way I can describe the problem is a miscommunication between the DaVinci Resolve program and my graphics processing unit (NVIDIA GeForce GPU). Linked below is the video that taught me how to fix it.
Since I have been taught this fix I have been able to solve all of the problems I’ve come across just by disabling then reenabling my GPU. I guess the answer really was turning it off and back on again.
Resources:
Problem solved, Davinci resolve 16 not running problem. “Davinci Resolve 16 Not Running Problem. ||Davinci Keeps on Crashing While Opening||Problem Solved.” YouTube, 4 May 2019, youtu.be/C9lhMhVGp6M. Accessed 25 Mar. 2020.
“The marvels of daily life are exciting; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street.”
Robert Doisneau
I agree, no movie director can arrange the unexpected we encounter in our daily life, but Addie and I did our best to arrange our rough cut from the film clips we gathered from our two days of filming.
Luckily I found we had more than enough footage to introduce the movie’s plot, despite us not having many of the shots we actually planned.
Location Location Location
Originally we had planned to film in several different locations and include a shot with Addie and I together and then a shot with just me alone in each of these locations. But as time rolled around we ended up filming in only three locations: Lake Jovita Park, San Ann Park, and the student parking lot.
This was beneficial to the making of the movie because they were all public/community parks or our own school campus, so we did not have to contact any business for permission to film on their property.
To0 Many Shots Not Enough Space
At these locations we still maintained our original story board but instead of having us at different locations we shot at different parts of the park. For example you can see within the rough cut where we had shots of Addie and I together on the swings and then shots of me alone on the swings. And another instance where we had shots of Addie and I together on the basketball courts and then me alone on the basketball courts.
In editing together the two swing shots I did my best to create both a graphic match cut and a match on action cut in order to emphasize to the viewer the difference between the two shots. This difference being Addie no longer being in the shot, I wanted this to be emphasized that way the viewer understood, before hearing my dialogue on the phone, that Addie has left and I am sad because of it.
I wanted to use this method with all of the other shots we had captured in this way but I ended up running out of room. I was trying to accomplish too many things to make the inclusion of more shots possible. I wanted to both match the lyrics to the song we had chosen and make the progression of all the shots make sense. When I tried to include more of these shots it became confusing how I got to the parking lot and why I was there. This is why I decided to cut some shots and include more shots of me driving and entering the car alone.
I will be explaining more about our rough cut and the corrections that need to be made before our final cut in a later posts but for now please enjoy viewing it below.
I agree with Da Vinci’s statement about simplicity and therefore decided to choose a program that valued simplicity where I could edit sound, adjust speed, and color correct all in one place.
This program was appropriately named DaVinci Resolve 16 and is a program both YouTubers recommended in the videos featured in my last post.
DaVinci resolve combines 8K editing, color correction, visual effects and audio post production all in one software. If you are unfamiliar with 8K editing it is the editing of videos with a resolution of 8K, meaning a video that displays about 8000 pixels in each shot. 8K resolution is the highest resolution defined in the Rec. 2020 and allows for the use of a wide lens.
DaVinci resolve has also experienced some updates from previous versions and has implemented pieces of software within their system that enables features not seen in other free editing programs.
DaVinci Resolve 16 features a new cut page different from its previous versions that is uniquely designed for editors who need to work quickly to meet deadlines.
A DaVinci Neural Engine has also been added to the editing software. This engine uses machine learning to enable features such as facial recognition and speed warp. At the end of this post I have included a video where I used this speed warp feature to edit a screen recorded video of me working with the DaVinci resolve 16 program.
In addition to its new neural engine the program also includes accelerated scopes for its Graphics Processing Unit or GPU. This allows for more technical monitoring options, which I found advantageous when it came to previewing my editing. When first editing I would receive several popups that interrupted my editing by saying the “GPU Memory is Full”. With the technical monitoring options I was able to change the resolution of my preview monitor and reduce my use of the GPU memory.
Another aspect of DaVinci resolve that makes it appealing is its quick export feature that allows you to upload projects directly to YouTube. However, I have not learned how to use this feature yet and for the video below I first download the video to my computer then upload it to YouTube, which was an easier process than I have experienced with other editing systems.
Below is a link to a time lapsed video of me working with the DaVinci Resolve 16 video editing software to edit our first rough cut (which I hope to reveal to you in my next post.)
Resources
“8K Resolution.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 18 Mar. 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8K_resolution.
“Editing is the only process. The shooting is the pleasant work. The editing makes the movie, so I spend all my life in editing.”
Garry Marshall
Now that we have acquired the footage we need it is time to begin editing, because as Garry Marshall states, “editing makes the movie.”
Addie and I have decided that I should act as the primary editor for the film, given the fact that I have previous experience working with film editing programs. In addition to this, my computer is also newer than Addie’s and is better suited to handle editing software. I plan to work closely with Addie in class during the editing process. Having her review what I have edited will give me a new set of eyes that can tell me what works and what doesn’t.
As I began to edit our rough cut I learned very quickly that I would have to download a new editing software. The current software I had downloaded on my computer was Cyber Link’s Power Director 12, which was released in September 2013. This program was outdated and did not allow me to upload videos that had been filmed on the iPhone cameras.
Before downloading another editing program I decided to do some research to determine what editing program would be best for creating our opening title sequence.
I needed a program that would allow me a significant amount of control when it came to editng both sound and video. The program needed to be simple in the sense that I could learn how to use it quickly but complicated enough to allow me design titles and use color correction.
Most importantly the editing program needed to be free. As stated previously this is a low budget indpendent film, so we need to reduce the cost of production, and post production as much as possible. This is why an editing software that does not require you to submit any financial information or start a “free trial” is what we hope to find in our research.
To find this perfect editing software I turned to YouTube users. Those on the YouTube platform are often low budget, like us, but have had more experience working in video editing and maintaining their public channel. This is why I asked people using their platfrom what editing programs they used to create there videos. I found that many users had a video on their channel that gave a list of free editing software they viewed as the best. This is where I came across the two videos below.
In my next blog I will discuss what editing software I chose to download and why along with the experience I have had working with it so far.
“How do you shoot a 150-day movie? You shoot it one day at a time.”
David Fincher
I hope this title sequence does not take 150 days to shoot, but we are taking it one day at a time.
As we were getting ready to start shooting on our second day I realized that Addie and I needed some extra help. Since we had created a team with just the two of us, and would both be acting within the same scenes I thought it would be best to have an extra set of hands to help with everything. This extra set of hands ended up being my younger brother and sister.
I gave my sister the responsibility of using her iPhone to film scenes with both Addie and I. We gave her a run down of the plot of the movie and our brand, this gave her an idea of what kind of shots we wanted to capture for our film. I told her some specific shots I needed to get but a part from that I gave her creative liberty and let her do what looked best on camera.
My brother was given the responsibility of collecting and managing our props. Since we would be filming at the park I thought it would make sense to bring some balls or scooters that we could use at the park. My brother found his basketball and gathered together some of his old scooters for us to use. He later helped to carry our props around the park and made sure that the props not being used in the scene stayed out of the way while we were filming.
Not only did they help with the physical creation of the footage but they helped keep Addie and I on schedule as well. Being friends Addie and I tend to get distracted talking to one another and playing around instead of filming, but since I put my sister in charge of filming we could talk and capture great footage at the same. Without the stress of having to direct ourselves for specific shots or using a tripod to shoot, the footage we captured came out looking more natural.
The one disappointment that did occur while filming was us only having the opportunity to film within the two parks and not other locations. Depending on what our rough cut looks like we may end up shooting in other locations, as we had initially planned to do, in order to add some variety to the film.
While I do plan on having to film, and refilm, more scenes for the movie I am excited to see the results of the initial rough cut and be able to show it to all of you as well.
One Day or Day One 