Unpacking the Rough Cut pt.2

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.

Resources

“Clint Eastwood Quotes.” BrainyQuote, http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/clint_eastwood_634914. Accessed 27 Mar. 2020.

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