Post-production

Post-production is finally underway! I thought the day would never come.

How Filming Went

Like I mentioned last time, I was going to get nature footage for the opening on Wednesday, which turned out to be a success. Even thought it might of just been from my phone, there are some genuinely beautiful shots I got.

A screen-cap of a piece of nature footage collected on Wednesday. 

I also did not let the lack of a tripod stop me in this process. With a bit of ingenuity, I came up with a solution: a ladder and a tape measure.

My solution in the field.

You might be wondering how I used these common items you might find in a garage to film in an outside set. The answer is quite simple. I used the ladder to place my phone on top of a surface (the top step), then put the tape measure in front of the phone to act as a weight to stop the phone from falling off. This combined with a bit of extra support from my hands meant I was able to get much more stabilized shots than I would have otherwise. Problem solved!

Editing Update

I imported these clips and the ones Edward had sent me from his set into my editor of choice, Adobe Premiere Pro. I have already stated beforehand that the Adobe suite of editing programs are ones that I am very experienced in and are my “go-to’s” whenever putting together any production.

Funny enough, after all this experience I still cannot manage to make an organize timeline!

As of right now, the basic structure is pretty much complete. The film opening has a very upbeat and energetic pacing to match the fun tone we want to establish. The montage of the protagonist escaping is edited to the beat of the song my group and I picked last week, but as of now is lacking in sound effects. A long while back I did research on free and royalty free audio libraries such as freesound.org and the Youtube Audio Library (click here to see that post). I will check these sources as I definitely need audio clips of a person running and a forest soundscape to coherently mesh together the nature footage in the opening credits sequence. Speaking of the opening credits sequence, I think adding a mystical sounding ambient music behind the nature sounds I plan on adding will help to invoke the sense of wonder and beauty I am trying to establish. If anything, I could also get additional sounds by producing foley recordings off of my phone for minor actions such as grabbing items off of countertops, opening and closing a backpack, etc. I also feel the shots look bland and should be more colorful, especially the nature shots to emphasize the beauty of the outdoors. Other than that, all that is left is to add the title card, credits, and make any minor tweaks as they appear.

I need to get back to editing as we are rapidly approaching our deadline which is about two days away... Scary...
Either way, I cannot wait until you guys get to finally check out the opening. I will see you all (VERY) soon!