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POST-PRODUCTION BLOG 3 - Unnatural Selection

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POST-PRODUCTION BLOG 3 - Unnatural Selection

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Upon starting post-production I was immediately faced with issues that could seriously effect the edit. The biggest of these as for the majority of scenes the sound had been mixed to a very low volume (averaging -40Db), so I contacted Connoll, a technician at the university of Salford about booking out the voice acting studio to attempt to dub the majority of the film with ADR. In the end we initially booked out 14 hours split over the weekend of the 4th and 5th of May.

However, this also caused issues in the assembly stage of the edit. I dedicated the 29th to the 3rd to assembly allowing us to reach a rough cut by the ADR weekend. However due to the state of the audio pairing sound files to video files became quite difficult as on some clips it was hard to determine where the clapper was and increasing the gain only caused the audio to distort. I tried to persevere, by using the internal camera microphone whenever the external audio was unintelligible.

The other major issue I faced during the first week of the edit  was a lack of communication with the director. As she made clear in preproduction she seemed to have a very laissez faires approach to the edit and this was amplified by her lack of presence during the assembly week. I tried to combat this by uploading every scene I had completed to youtube, sending it over to her to give feedback, but this limited communication made her feedback very limited and  unhelpful.

The ADR weekend went well with myself and Ryan arriving at 9am on the Saturday and carrying out the dubbing of Boyson's lines from 10am-1pm, Tristen's lines from 1pm-2:30pm and Mason's lines from 2:30-3:45pm. The following day we arrived at the same time to record the remaining lines, however the actor playing the adviser was unable to make it so we split the day in half for recording Alex's lines followed by Emma's lines. We then made a new booking the following Saturday for 3 hours to pick up the adviser's lines and also carry out and experiment with some much needed Foley for the film.

The second week of production saw Ryan and I split the edit into colour correction/visual effects and sound design; as I was more experienced in the latter I took it on.

As all the ADR was synced up to the footage I brought all the sound files recorded over the weekend onto the time line while muting all the existing audio tracks (not deleting them just in case I would use parts of the clips for other purposes further in the edit). I then began to collect and create wild tracks and ambience to play under the scenes from those taken on set and from freesound.org to help blend the dubbed lines into the scene. I stacked multiple layers of tracks and softened some of the with FFT filters to remove any peaking or standing out sound, whilst also adding a surround reverb effect to give the wild track a stereophonic effect and better match the environment shown.

Once the atmosphere was sorted I went on to mixing the ADR recordings, changing their gain when necessary and adding studio reverb effects to blend them into their environment. (For instance in the long metallic corridor shots I increased the reverb to echo out in a more metallic way compared to those of the soft bedroom scenes.)

The final ADR/Foley session went well. We quickly go the few adviser lines that needed to be dubbed out of the way and then moved onto Foley. I'd assembled a small team to help carry out the process over the week and, like ADR, had logged the time codes for each sound effect needing to be recorded. I had also devised a shopping list for the session to collect items I had researched that would work well for effects. (For example a ham for the punches/headbutt in the cultivation suite scene or celery for broken bones). Over post production I spent 17 hours in the Voice Acting Studio for ADR and Foley.

Once these were then added to my timeline I consolidated my clips to Ryan's project to attach the two together.

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PRODUCTION BLOG 2 - Unnatural Selection 

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PRODUCTION BLOG 2 - Unnatural Selection 

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During production I made sure to keep in close contact with the production crew and met with them at the end of each shooting day to collect and organise all files from the camera, zoom and ninjaflame as to ensure thorough data wrangling and limiting the chance of losing files. Once organised into dates I set about organising the files into specific scenes to improve editing speed and organisation for post production.

I organised with fellow editor, Ryan Taylor, about a post production editing schedule and plan. I suggested we split the editing into scenes relating to locations rather than something as specific as scenes or non specific as first half/second half of the film. I did this to try and disguise any obvious continuity between our editing styles, as without any real direction, in our edit, the differences may become obvious if we work with the same source material.

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PREPRODUCTION BLOG 1- Unnatural Selection

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PREPRODUCTION BLOG 1- Unnatural Selection

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During preproduction, myself and Ryan have very little jobs to carry out for our roles as editors. To use the week productively he took on the role of designing the title card for the film whereas I produced an annotated script with transitions and audio/visual cut suggestions, while also producing a poster to support the film. For the poster I designed a draft inspired by the cult like religious thematic and the first and also final scene of the film and got the OK from the director and writer. I then booked out camera equipment and liaised with costume/make up and the director about a time where I could get the main Villain for a photoshoot. I took multiple photos of the initial "hand in focus reaching out to camera" pose then a few other poses just in case I changed my mind about the design or wanted to make additional ones. I took the photo and used a royalty free forest image and noose image to create the backdrop. The final poster is shown in the blog post above

I tried to organise a meeting with our director about how she wanted the film edited, but she seemed to have a very laissez-faire approach to the edit and had no real direction in mind. This did worry me somewhat as I would consider myself having a rather unique editing style focusing on movement and flow over dramatic tension and sharp cuts, however, it did grant me a large amount of freedom in which to research thriller film editing and find my own case studies and inspirations.