Editing Update

So as of the 30th of March the filming for "ink" is officially finished, we had to do multiple re shoots for the kitchen scene as we rally struggled to get the scene to a satisfactory level with regards to run time and the scene feeling natural.  One of the main problems we had was correctly directing the accesses in order to get a believable scene, the shot where Penelope sees the pen's power for the first time was a nightmare to film, we really struggled to get a take where the accesses performance was good and getting the zoom right with the total shot being under 4/5 secs.  But eventually we reached a point where we felt that we had a good take for every shot.


Editing

The last thing to be completed before we could submit the film was the editing. We already learned some of the basics of film editing in the editing workshop we did earlier in the term.  one thing we really focussed on in the editing of "ink" was continuity between shots, that is making sure that there are no jumps between actions or movements between the shots.  The reason we thought this was especially important for "ink" was that we have a lot of very fast cuts, and overall have a large number of shots for a 3 minute film.

Another problem we had while editing was sourcing good quality sound effects and music, we really struggled to find good quality free sound effects, it didnt help that we seemed to have different idea about what sort of sound should be used for when objects appeared, however after a huge amount of times searching through hundreds of sounds, we finally settled on an effect that we all felt fitted the tone of the film correctly

Lastly we had to select 2 pieces of music to go over the montage of jenny in her bedroom, and the fight scene.  As with the sound effects for the other parts of the film, sourcing good quality music for free was very difficult, but we eventually found 2 pieces of music that complimented the visuals there were accompanying.

With the sound and music in place, and the finer parts of the editing painstakingly completed by us as a group, the film was ready to be submitted.

Filming update

So with the creative part of the film completed, everything was in place for us to begin filming, filming took place over 3/4 weeks, with us doing around 7/8 shoots in total including re shoots.  Although most of the work on set was a group effort, my main role was to take charge of the sound,  I had 3 pieces of equipment at my disposal:

• The default mic on the camera

• A wireless mic and receiver

• The boom mic

each of these pieces of equipment have different  pros and cons, the mic on the camera is easy to use and provides audio from the point of view of the camera, the wireless mic is very good for picking up dialogue or for use in tight sets where the boom is hard to operate, and the boom mic provides the best audio quality overall, but can be hard to operate and use.

For most of the shoots I chose to predominantly use the camera mic for ambient noise and actions, and the wireless mic for the dialogue during the kitchen scenes, the boom was used in one of the shoots, but we had difficulty getting it to function properly so it was not utilised as much as I would have liked to.

I looked into action comedy to assist with directing the fight scene as we as a group felt that this might be difficult, I came across this video analysing some of Jackie Chan's films and the style he uses for making funny fight scenes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1PCtIaM_GQ

Although there is a huge amount of really good information in this video, I found the comments about editing and flow to be very interesting, talking about how static camera positions and longer shots can completely change the flow and feel of a fight scene.  I think some of these techniques could be useful for the fight scene in our film, as we plan for it to be the main funny part of the film.