Creating Isa's POV when taking Nos

During one of the drug scene Isa takes Laughing Gas and there is a slo-motion effect of he POV. Mike had filmed these at a high frame rate so I didn't have to worry about changing the speed of them. I would just add in so additional effects to emphasis the effect of Laughing gad/ nos. 

When researching the effects of Nos it appears that everything just seemed to be slow and it effects you hearing a lot more then visuals. I thought about what I could do to the shots to be subtle but still give a nice effects visually to watch. I read about the effects of LSD and how you hear colour and see sounds. I thought I would bring that sort of idea into this scene. even though it might not be technically correct we are wanting to create what is more visually interesting the a factual film. 

Prior to adding any effects I cut together the shots that I wanted to use in a simple layout in Avid. Luckily due to the fact that I looked over the rushes prior to leaving the location I was able to get the shots re shot as they were originally incredibly grainy. These takes were a lot more clearer and I was glad I stepped in in the production stage to get these better shots. 

As a lot of the shots all seemed to have a yellow tint I first brought the footage into Da Vinci to colour grade them. I am still learning Da Vinci and I couldn't get it to open the AAF File from Avid so I resorted to just imported the original clips separately  to be graded rather then the timeline shots from Avid. This wasn't to bad as there was only a couple shots and were short takes. 

In Da Vinci I used the scopes to grade the shots rather then just my own eye as it can be deceiving what looks white and what is actually a white. This is a simple way to grade as you try to balance out the reds, blues and greens. I used the graphs and created a slight S bend in them initially as this created a more depth in the shades of colours then adjusted them in accordingly. 

Screenshot from Davinci

I then brought this new graded footage into After Effects as separate clips to add effects to them. When thinking about the whole "seeing sounds hearing colours" concept I thought about the idea of ripples for each sound, like when rhians laughs and the guitars. 

When talking through this scene with Hannah I know she is going to play around with warping sounds a lot so this sort of subtle effects could work really nicely at adding another layer to it without distracting from the sound design. I tracked the movement of Rhians mouth with the tracking feature within After Effects and used this to create the path for the centre of the ripples to follow. I then fiddled around with the size and depth of ripple until I was happy with the effect. 

I then re did this process with the shots of Hugh holding the guitar, having ripples appear from where he plucks the string and then as the camera pans you see ripples from the tip of the guitar too. I am really please with how this works and I think when Hannah creates the sound design it will be a really nice scene. I may have to go back and sweek with the timings of the ripples depending on what the sound design is like but it gives a base for Hannah to work with.

After Effects 

I then rendered out the new shots and re-imported them into Media composer to create the sequence. The shots on either side of these POV shots are of Isa finishing the Balloon and then laughing at the slower frame rate. I have decided to use an effect within Avid, Time Warp, to change the speed so that is changes and shows the drugs take effect and then wear off. I simply speeded up the half the shots and gradually slowed it back to 100% speed. This worked really well in showing the transition between the drugs effects and normal.

Avid Media Composer - Problems

When editing the car sequence I seemed to have a lot of problems with Media Composer. It would freeze and then loose all visual playbacks. I spent quite a sufficient amount of time researching online what the problem might be a possible solutions. A lot of people talked about damaged footage and Media Composer not being able to read it and others talked about its a timeline issue. It wasn't until after talking to Stores and then finally Chris that it was a simple solution to this. 

Screenshot of Error that appeared

This Error was to due with the buffer (memory) of the project. It was having difficulty somewhere in its database, we tried to relink this within Avid. This didn't work so instead we tried to delete the database for the project. This is so that when we reopen the project it will re build the database and hopefully linking and fixing the buffer problem. To do this you go into the Avid Project files and delete the msmMMOB.mdb, msmFMID.prm and Creating folder. to easily find these if you set finder to organise the files by date modified it will be the there newest one. Delete and empty trash then open up the project again. It then spent a while rebelling these files and worked Fine.

Files that need to be deleted.

Car Scene

During My tutorial with Chris he mentioned maybe play around with Split screen for the driving scenes. I liked this idea, due to the fact that the Pigeon scene is being cut it would add a bit more depth to them driving and hopefully make it more interesting to watch from a viewers perspective. 

When researching split screens I came across a montage of all the split screens featured in Thomas Crown Affair. I found this very helpful when trying to think up compositions of the shots and used it to inspire the layout to majority of the sequence.

For the full montage, it is available here :  

http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/ccManager/clips/montage-of-split-screen-sequences-from-the-thomas/view

In my previous version I liked how it cut between Isa, Luke and then Rhian. Its nice how it shows how rhian finds Luke funny for interrupting Rhian and Hugh in the front, it them shows how Luke is oblivious to his actions and then finally it shows Rhian annoyed and looking at Hugh for him to step in. I think its subtle in shows the dynamics in the group and the relationships between the characters. I made sure I still keep this layout of showing the characters in this order when creating the split screen.

As I was creating a lot of layers in this sequence, I decided it would be more organised if i was to create this sequence in a separate timeline so that at a later date if i need to shuffle and move shots/ scenes around it would't effect the complex layers of video. I called this sequence Car Scene followed by the date and time that I created it. This is so that if I need to go back to a later version I can easily select when I need to go back to.

Screenshot of Car Sequence

To make the split screen look more professional I used a Black screen and crops it down and layered it over to create the lines around each shot. This was a lengthily process but I wasn't till after I had done this, that I learnt you can create this effect using the Title Tool. You only have to simple draw the lines where you want each of them, save it then place it on top of that part of the sequence. This made my timeline a lot neater as I only needed one layer for all the lines. 

First Assembly

Firstly I went through and created a rough assembly of each scene with the coverage that we had. This was more difficult then I had anticipated. As none of the shots had been planned in advance it was difficult trying to get them to work with each other without creating to many jump cuts.

The first scene seemed to be challenging as the only two shot was through the glass doors. As the glass was so dirty there is such a contrast of quality between them and the CU with the sunrise, they are unusable. This then meant I only have one take of a close up on Isa and several takes of a CU on Rhian to use for this scene. This then meant I wasn't able to use the pan around onto Isa but instead use a static shot and then just cut between the CU on Isa and the CU on Rhian. 

I created a rough version that I was not happy with to get the idea of how the scene fit next to each other and will go back and re cut it to make a smooth edit. The next scene that I worked on was the Driving scene. This scene shows the characters driving along and then they hit a pigeon. From being on set and the concerns that I already had I knew this would't be an easy edit. I looked over the footage and one take of the "pigeon" hitting the window that looked fairly realistic to what would happen was unusable due to the actors and Camera Guy laughing. The only other take was when the bag of fake blood burst all over the windscreen which looked incredible fake and unrealistic. This being zoo i tried to edit and cut on when they start laughing but there was very limited shots due to the crew rushing on set.

I brought this up with the group saying that we need to re-shoot this scene at a later time and they seemed happy to do so and thought this might be the case due to not putting in the effort to film it right the first time around.

The rest of the driving scenes seemed to work nicely and the interior shots of driving worked really well next to each other. I will have to go back and crop Hughs shots down as you can tell he's not driving. Also I will have to go back in the fine cut to blur out Mike as you can see him in the Rear View Mirror.