Production Log: 17/11/13

This week I have gone back into my MixPad audio file for my short film to make sure that audio matches up perfectly with the film, seeing as now I have all of the footage done to make sure that I can do this. 

I edited the sound of the plane flying around the globe for my Ident so that the sound appears to be coming closer, louder, then moving away which now lines up with the footage. My 'One Rehearsal' Ident sequence is a parody of the Universal Pictures ident of the 1930's and 40's. 

I also edited the sound of the traffic and the flickering neon sign so that they rise in volume whenever Mallow, the camera, and the audience's ear, were closer to the window, which similarly had to be louder when Lotta opened the door, as the camera was closer, than it was when she closed it during the two-shot. 

There were also various sound effects like a match being struck and the sound of Marshal's leg hitting the chest of drawers which were added in as the footage looked bare without it so I had to find various other sound effects that sounded perfect. All of the sound effects within the film have been added in; the only audio that was recorded by the camera is the dialogue scene between Lotta and Mallow. 

This dialogue, recorded on the camera mic (after the visuals were filmed) had to be extracted, I had to run through WavePad to convert it to mono and add the 'old fashioned' sound, then dropped into this soundtrack as the final track of the five, but precisely, so that the background music of Lotta's Theme exactly matched that playing was already playing as a separate track, so that the later could be faded out without any noticeable jump in the sound. From here, all I had to do was to match the audio file with the video. However, while editing the footage I noticed that the transition the dialogue in each shot would sound odd; and sometimes the dialogue would over lap when I was trying to make the audio continue from one clip to another; so in Adobe Premier Pro I used the 'Constant Gain' tool to make the transition a lot smoother as this made the audio fade seamlessly over each other. After this, the error was almost completely unnoticeable.

Production Log: 11/11/13

I have recently begun editing for my short film. Now that I have a complete audio track, of which I used during filming as a guideline for the actors to know what they should be doing during certain moments, as the camera's mic was only needed for the dialogue scene, most of the filming was done in a music video-esque style so for the majority of filming the mic was not required. As the original track was played out loud, this made it incredibly easy for me to match the footage to the soundtrack as the actors were perfect in keeping in time with the soundtrack, so all I had to do was listen to the soundtrack left on the footage and put the footage inline with the actual soundtrack. Of course, this did not flow perfectly throughout the entire film as some sections I had to make longer or shorter, but it did make the editing process significantly easier. I am using Adobe Premier Pro to edit the visuals for my video. As I filmed my movie in 'mono' and created the effects myself by lowering the amount of light the camera picked up. I will not have to add any effects to make the film look Film Noir in post-production.

Photographs from Filming