I mentioned in Shooting Day(s) several times how I reacted when looking at the shots I had taken after the shoot was over. The one shot I didn't mention reacting to was one I specifically saved for this point to seperate and emphasize it, since it is what I'm most proud of in the making of this film.
I knew I wanted to make the final scene a night scene, since that's when you get the dark, contrast-filled imagery noir is known for. On the day of the original shoot, I shot all the daytime images as described in Shooting Day(s). After that, I rested, copied all the photos onto the computer and other such things until after nightfall. At about nine o'clock, daylight had completely vanished and it was totally dark. Now was the time when I wanted to capture a shot looking out of my window, looking across the vast sea of houses to accompany the character's monologue about the human race attempting to fit him into their idea of the world, and also to serve as a kind of establishing shot for the moving image sequence, despite the fact that anyone but me would have no idea the image and video sequences were connected. After turning up the exposure as far as it would go, I began slowing the shutter speed, taking images at progressively slower speeds. first 1/4 a second, a half second, a second, and so on up until the final shot, which was at six seconds. Each one improved over the last, starting off at just the streetlamps being barely visible blobs, getting steadily better. However, with increasing shutter exposure times comes issues of movement. The slightest jitter or nudge of the camera will result in a blurry mess, so I placed the camera on a small box on the windowsill and held it down firmly to minimise movement. It still wasn't perfect, as several blurred images still resulted as just shifting my weight slightly while the shutter was open blurred the image. With the final shot though, with the shutter speed at six seconds, I managed to keep still long enough to capture the image I'm most proud of, a very dark shot with the houses and streets outlined in highlights, little areas of light in the black void. While there were some artefacts in the image as a result of the long exposure, namely some random clusters of white pixels here and there making it look like there was rain or dirt or some other detritus on the lens, after converting the images from circa 4000x3000 sized jpegs to 1920x1080 jpegs (by means of importing each one individually into a 1920x 1080 project in Premiere, zooming out on the image and reframing it to get the desired composition, and then using the Export Frame tool) and exporting the final edited video, the glitched pixels had disappeared. In the end, that shot was the final image before the video sequence, with one of the blurred images used before that after course tutor Dan took a liking to it while giving me feedback.
And that leads me onto the focus of this post, post production and editing.
First, I had to record the narration I had written. This was a relatively simple process. I already had a USB vocal microphone from a company named ProSound and a pop filter (a black screen placed between you and the mic to stop distortion from you blowing into the mic when exhaling or making 'puh' and 'tuh' sounds) as a part of my own personal collection of production elements. I had some minor issues with volume control, since no matter what I did the audio recorded was very quiet, and amplifying it resulted in a lot of background noise. Fortunately, I was recording the audio using NCH's WavePad software, and after trying various levels of noise reduction, I found that using the noise reduction tool set to the -35db setting resulted in a clean, crisp audio track. After applying a 'gargle' filter to the recorded narration, lowering the pitch from 100% to 80%, and amplifying it once again to offset the volume drop the filter and pitch change incurred, I had ideal-sounding audio. Playing about with the software in some downtime, I was messing around with some narration I had recorded for the Contextual Studies project I had produced beforehand, and accidentally set the pitch change tool to 400%. The resulting sound was only made more demonic and twisted when I reversed the audio. The resulting chittering sound was used in the final film for the 'sub-human'.
In the actual edit itself, I had the issue of the moving image sequence, in particular the effect of the glowing eyes. As I tried to figure out how to achieve the effect, having not really thought about it beyond the vague idea to draw scratchy messes with the iPad that would somehow match up to the vicinity of the eyes. In the end, I was inspired by the webseries Atop The Fourth Wall, specifically this episode, in which the villain is portrayed as having static-filled blobs for eyes. I decided that would be the easiest effective option available. Although I forgot to credit them in the end credits, the static was taken from this site:
http://recroomhq.com/downloads/2010/04/14/tv-static-freebie.html
...where you can use the downloaded videos for anything you want, whether commercial or not. With the video in hand, I had to painstakingly animate the effect using the Garbage Matte effect. With this effect, you overlay one video over another, and can cut the overlaid video into any shape you want, the only limit being the number of points you're able to manipulate. I used an eight-point matte, since it gave the shape of the eyes while still being sharp and simple enough a shape to give an otherworldly effect. For the first few frames, I put in a lot of effort to make sure the overlay was placed directly over the eyes and cut out as close to perfectly as I could manage. After making very slow progress, I decided it would be quicker to do a 'rough run' through all the images, getting them approximately in the right place and shape, and then go through them again to tidy up. As it turned out, the rough, jumpy effect that resulted from the inaccurate placings of the matte worked so well that it was left as is, with the exception of one or two frames that were so out of line with the others that it spoiled the effect.
Another technical issue was with the small dragon that hatches from the mobile phone. I wanted to have a flapping sound to indicate that it was flying away, but after recording myself flapping a coat and trying different pitches and speeds to get it to sound right, I couldn't get it to work. After searching the internet for free sound effects with no royalty restrictions and coming up blank, I left the scene without it, and I think it worked well enough.
Then there was the problem of effects and music. The latter element was covered, as there are currently three volumes of the Ren and Stimpy Production Music available online, which are compilations of the uncopyrighted music used in the eponymous Nickelodeon TV show. I picked out a few tracks prior to editing which achieved the right mood, and selected from those few some pieces to go with each scene. In a nice bit of continuity, the opening scene has the same cue ("Satanic" by Richard Harvey) used in the opening of the Interview Project, which almost makes it the character's title theme. The effects were more problematic. While I reused an ambient wild track recorded for Coastal Path, the Super 8 project from last year, for the ambience of the graveyard scene, I had no suitable recordings for any other sounds that would be needed, and I couldn't go out and record some, since my microphone is USB powered and thus only works when connected to a computer and not designed for outdoor use, and the H4n Zoom has proven itself in previous attempts at using it to be effective when connected to the mains, but an absolute disaster when battery powered (eating up batteries staggeringly fast), so I had no option but to turn to the internet. Fortunately, the site soundbible.com offers sound effects in a wide variety of license statuses, and I made sure to use only effects that were licensed under Attribution (i.e. available for all purposes as long as you credit the site somewhere in your work) or Public Domain licenses.
The only other major point of interest during post production was in the 5.1 mixing. I can say without a shadow of a doubt that 5.1 mixing has been the most effort I've ever put into an element of a production that yielded absolutely zero benefits. After making the post-production process several times more time-consuming, stressful and complicated than it needed to be, at the final screening the 5.1 sounded exactly like it would have if I'd just made the damn thing in stereo. The only noticeable effect of the 5.1 was that since I had no experience mixing 5.1, I didn't realise that setting a track to be dead centre in Premiere's 5.1 mixer did not send out sound to all speakers like I had thought, but instead sent it to the subwoofer. Thus, several effects and the entirety of the music was rendered as bass rumble. Fortunately this turned out to be something of a happy accident, since the rumble produced from what should have been effects and music turned out to work fine in context too, a particular highlight being that the choral cue over the 'sub-human' killing scene and beyond came out as an eerie, foreboding heartbeat-like sound, which fit the mood perfectly. I imagine a lot of the problems with the audio mixing stemmed from using the 5.1 mixing tools in Premiere, when really it seems to be intended that you mix 5.1 in Audition then import that mixed audio into a 5.1 track instead of a dozen mono tracks all linked to one of the speakers as I did. However, since you needed to hand in six mono audio files as part of the brief as well as to master a 5.1 DVD in Compressor, and I'm not sure if you can do that in Audition, I had little choice. Still, the amount of effort versus the gains received means that I still loathe 5.1 mixing with a passion, and I swear if the brief for next term requires a 5.1 mix I will have a primal urge to kill something.
And that covers post-production. In the next post, we cover how the project changed from concept to screen, and I evaluate every step of the way.
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