Editing: Rough Cut

Oliver and I linked up yesterday to edit the short film into a full and nearly complete rough cut, including color grading, sound, and a completed sequence from start to finish. Here's an overview of the session.

The Editing Session

We spent over 13 hours together piecing everything together. The process started with us combining each of the rough scenes we edited into a single project. From here we split the work and edited on separate computers. I was in charge of all things audio while Oliver was handling color grading. For me this meant music, sound design, and mixing. Audio is crucial to this production, as a lot of the genre conventions and comedy comes from what sounds are used. In order to find these sounds, I signed up for a free trial for Epidemic Sound, an extremely useful service that provides royalty free music tracks and SFX that can be downloaded in the click of a button. I am very impressed with it, and has definitely upgraded the short film into a living and breathing piece of media. I then adjusted the volume levels to make sure it was as clean as possible. Afterwards, the two of us once again combined projects, except this time was with our new additions. The final step in yesterday's editing session was putting in the Narrator dialogue Oliver recorded a couple days ago. By the end of the day, our session changed the short film from a couple of basic scenes into a rough cut that is nearly finalized and a creation that we both are super satisfied with. Check it out!

Conclusion

As we begin finishing editing, we only have a couple more things to add. For one, we are missing the screenplay text, a title card, the dialogue screen for the silent film, and the Narrator visual effects for the void scene. I plan to complete those with some graphic design help from Edward in the upcoming days. Edward is also starting work on the postcard and the social media page, so expect to hear more about them shortly. Oliver and I will continue to tighten the project until it feels ready for the world to see (or in this case in a week as our project is due then).  The end is near, but so is an awesome short film. I CAN'T WAIT!!!!!!!!!!!