Making Some Tweaks

Once I had (what I considered) a final edit of my film, I started to make some final tweaks. Two of those being doing some colour grading, and "cropping" my film to create a more cinematic look.

Colour Grading
I've had a little bit of experience with colour grading before, but I wouldn't say I am knowledgeable of the skill - there are people who's job is to purely colour grade. What I was aiming for was to sharpen and create deeper contrasts on some of my shots - have "proper" blacks and striking shadows. I played with a few presets that are available, but didn't really like the look of any of them.

Brighten

Contrast

Dew

Fall Sun

I decided to make some manual adjustments. I played with the exposure - the shadows, mid tones and highlights - and the colour levels.

Before correction

After correction

Cropping
In order to adjust any effect in Final Cut Pro X, you must open the 'Inspector'. This is found below the live preview screen (where you can see what you're editing). Once selected, it glows blue and shifts the entire top half of editing windows along to make room for the inspector window.

Once that was open, I expanded the "crop" panel, and started to make adjustments. I knew I wanted to crop the top and the bottom of the frame - to create "black bars" - but I wasn't sure by how many .px I should adjust it. I started to play around, and found that around 100px seemed to work well, so I stuck with that. 

0px, (no crop)

 100px (top and bottom crop)

The Ending

The ending of my film is something that's been bugging me.

I do not want to end abruptly.
I want to "wrap up" the story, in some way.
I don't want to create a whole other tangent of the story.
I don't want to take up too much time and detract time from telling the actual narrative.

In my presentation to the class, where I pitched my idea, I proposed the question "What direction should I take it?". I asked them to tell me the way they thought would be most successful, and they liked the idea of incorporating a failure into the narrative. I liked it too, but I then I thought about how I could do it. Previously on here I've spoken about my worry of over complicating things, and I've got this worry again. Some of my ideas require me to shoot extra footage, and some can be applied straight away.

Here's a few ideas I have:
- The sounding of a doorbell, and a shot of a panicked face and a wide shot of a still messy room.
- Wide shot of a tidy room, relieved face, lighting a candle, sounding of a doorbell.

- The hoover approaches the screen very closely (I already have this shot), and at the closest point there is a dip to black. You can hear the sound of the hoover dying out, heavy breathing and a clock ticking, and after an appropriate pause, the sound of a doorbell ringing or a door knocking.
- The sounding of a doorbell, and a medium shot of feet running and suddenly stopping - a pile of clothes is then dropped, to signify panic and failure.

At the moment, I am leaning towards the idea in bold. I'm drawn to the way it will tie in with the beginning of my film (e.g. the black screen), and will give focus to the sound effects and scope for me to experiment with sound and the feelings they portray further. As well it tying in with the beginning, it will also leave a slight cliff-hanger - even though above I stated I wanted to "wrap up" the story. This leaves it open and could leave you wondering (e.g. did they do it in time?).

Also, I want to avoid any opportunity for rubbish acting...

I'm most certainly not the most dramatic and emotional actor. I don't want to include any more shots containing bad acting...as that's just going to detract from the message I want and not have a positive effect on my film. 

Editing in FCP X

Firstly, I have a title screen and a title.

I've gone for a very simple font, title and positioning, because I didn't want to bring more video into the introduction. The font choice was based on the meaning of the word 'messy', so I went for something handwritten. I did have other, 'messier' versions, but I didn't think they were very legible, so decided on this one. 

I've found myself extremely zoomed in on the timeline...

This is because I've been focusing on trimming shots frame by frame, and have noticed the importance of trimming by this much. It's allowed me to cut out any frames that do not contain any action. For example, a shot where my hand enters the frame and presses a button. If I cut this without zooming right into it and looking frame by frame, I may leave frames that still contain no action by accident. By zooming in, I can see if there is no action within each frame and trim this way, and this has played a huge part in creating a snappy edit. It's allowing me to ensure that there isn't any points that waste time that I could use elsewhere. When you're on tight constraints, you start to appreciate the importance of each frame and become ruthless. I've been removing shots that I like the look of but that just 'don't work', and I think this is making me a better editor. I'm able to separate myself from the edit, even though I'm the one in the film and I'm the one that's shot it, and focus purely on portraying a strong narrative.

Room Tone

I'm editing my film at the moment, and I'm finding the sound aspect of it tricky. There are points where I need to mute the sound from each clip, which is easily done, but it leaves a 'lull' of complete silence. I did some research online about this, and came across the phrases 'room tone' and 'wildtrack'.

These are filmmaking terms that describe the sound a room/location (e.g. a forest) is when it is just left - no other action is taking place, no one is talking etc. This creates the room tone/wild track, which can then be overlaid over an entire scene to avoid these lulls of silence and create consistency through each cut. It also helps to avoid a change in sounds between each cut, again creating consistency. This is the room tone I'm considering using in my film;