Unit 3: D1 - Analysing post-production techniques and processes

Sound

Music

The music is there to set the tone of the film and it's the first thing that can be heard in the film. The steady guitar strums and beat are there to get the viewer in the frame of mind for the film as it's intended to calm and prepare them which is accomplished by steadily fading in and out the music as it plays in the background. It took me a long time to find a suitable song for the film, I tried various songs with varying tones and levels of success but in the end I thought that this song (The Woods) by an Austrailian duo called Hollow Coves was the most suitable as it is about freedom and finding comfort, in addition to this it is also very relaxing and worked brilliantly with opening and closing the film - especially with the voice over at the end playing on top of it. I did also unintentionally have music playing in the background of some of the scenes in the film as the bar owner was busy and we didn't have anyone to tell to turn down the music. This causes parts of the film to feel disjointed as music plays in one scene and stops mid-sentence or worse - changes songs - between scenes.

Voice over

The voice over dialogue was heavily inspired by a poem in Kendrick Lamar's 2015 album "To Pimp A Butterfly" (TPAB) where Kendrick mentions the first two lines of a poem in the second song, and as the album develops and progresses he gradually adds more lines to it up until the final song "Mortal Man" where he delivers the full poem which reveals the overall moral of the album. I knew I couldn't do this throughout the film so I started and ended the film in this light as the last voice-over is a finished and more developed version of the first voice-over.

I added the voice-over after completing the first daft as I realised that I continuously had to inform the viewer about what was happening/what happened in the film as not all the actions of the characters made sense to them, so as a way to make it easier I decided to input the voice-over to allow the audience to know what Sam was thinking as I thought that the connection with her was the most important since early viewers had lots of questions about her. The voice-over allows the audience to know what Sam is thinking which is very important if I want them to understand Sam's emotions, thoughts and reasoning for her actions in the situations she finds herself in. I think I managed to accomplish this largely throughout the film and I do feel that there could've been a little more done to inform the audience but I'm just happy I managed to sort out some of the bigger issues early viewers and script reader had with the film before it was released.

Unfortunately, the microphone I used wasn't great so the sound quality did suffer and vary throughout production. The only other sound issue that happened - which was entirely my fault - was that I forgot to film a small scene/shot of Laura talking. As I didn't manage to film this section and Diana (the girl playing Laura) was on holiday abroad when I started editing, I had to improvise and asked her to send me a recording of the lines she had to say and then I layered it on top of some spare/scrap/unused footage I had taken from filming but the sound quality of the recording was extremely low with it being quiet and a little muffled and unclear.

Editing

Fixing missed scene

Fortunately, I was filming some behind the scenes footage whenever I could to help produce a behind the scenes video and thankfully one of the throw-away pieces of footage I had was used to fill out the gap in film that I forgot to shoot. The instance happens 5 minutes and 5 seconds into the film when the camera angle and distance suddenly change and the sound quality of the dialogue drops dramatically. This is because - as mentioned above, I had Diana send me an audio recording of her saying the lines we missed out and since she recorded it on her phone, the sound quality wasn't great. This does slightly hamper the quality of the overall film but it doesn't have a huge impact on it, but it was a vital scene to include in the film as the rest of the scenes following wouldn't make sense without it.

Tone

One of the big things about this project is the tone that it achieves as I wanted it to be a reflective piece of work and I believe that I achieved that with the editing by fading certain scenes in and out when needed. This was done to ease the viewer into and out of the film and specific scenes like when Sam walks back into the bar after the the second time she goes to the toilet to calm herself down where I use it as a mood setter to show that Sam has calmed down by just easing the audience back into the conflict between the two characters.
Another way I tried to show and set the tone was by the way I cut some of the scenes. Occasionally in the film I focused more on the reaction of the person listening rather than the person talking to show the audience their reaction and response to the comments made, this would've hopefully created a dynamic relationship between the viewer and character as the viewer would've hopefully managed to relate to something that one of the characters say or how they react to a comment.
The final things I added to the film was the credits, I had to implement the names of the actors and the characters they were playing to make it easier for the audience to recognise them when the film was playing - although I did actually forget to mention any of the character names throughout the film which would leave the audience guessing who's who while watching. I also added post-credits to show who else worked and helped on the film as well as a thank you to people and locations that helped and the musicians for the song that was used.

Mise-es-scene

One of the things that makes my film stand out is that it's all in black and white. Admittedly this wasn't the intention at the beginning, I felt it was the best thing to do when I found out that some of the shots I took had an orange look to them as I didn't change the white balance setting after filming outside. I chose to make the whole film black and white because I know it was much hard to see what scenes are orange and what scenes are okay, but it also worked to my benefit as it was a great way to show the contrast between the two characters and their beliefs. The only change I'd make is making the colour slowly fade in at the end to symbolise that not everything is as clear as black and white however that would've probably been seen as a mistake or confuse the audience when they view it.