For You, Dear Friend

Fiction Adaptation | Project Evaluation

When starting this unit, I was apprehensive that my ideas would turn out the way I imagined them due to the very short amount of time we had for this unit. However, I found that as I started doing more preparation for my project and research, I felt more prepared and more confident that the video would turn out the way I wanted.

What worked?

My favourite part about this project was the ability to be very creative and experimental within my visuals and the sound design. I enjoyed working through the poem and creating images that match the poem while also show my own perspective on the poem. 

• Research
• As I have created a video that has elements of a montage, doing the research for montages, helped me greatly. This is due to the fact that it helped me with knowing how montages are put together and what type of things I need to remember in order for it to be known as a montage. For example; montages don't follow a narrative. I had to remember this all the way through the project, and I feel like this was clear within the final video. 
• I chose to look deeply into the poem, and analyse it in a way that I could develop the images I see in my head and create them through visuals. By analysing my chosen poem, it guided me through developing the visuals and also through coming up with a very complicated sound design. 
• Having done research on the theme of depression, it helped when creating the visuals for my poem and it helped me look deeper into the emotions depressed people will feel and present.
• Scripting and Shooting
• When thinking about the visuals, I feel like my ideas have been presented well through the script and the way it's been shot.
• The script was a great way for me to note down the different elements I wanted to include in both the shooting and the editing. The footage that was shot during my shooting days clearly show my ideas, and also they show experimentation through the creativity presented.
• Some of my favourite shots are the blurry candle shots, and the black background shots with Micaiah sat in the middle of the shot.
• Editing
• The thing that I thought worked the best throughout the whole project was the editing of both the visuals and the audio.
• The editing process allowed me to experiment with the colour of the shots and also the pace of the video, which has made the video a lot more powerful and emotional. The desaturated look has created a sad and depressing tone which was what I wanted the outcome to look like. Not only do the images look the way I wanted them too, they also look more powerful and a lot better than my original idea.
• By experimenting with the colour of my shots, it helped me develop a final look that I was really happy with.
• With the sound design, I found that my sound skill developed greatly. This is due to the amount of varied soundtracks and layers I added, and also due to the build up I created throughout the video.
• The echo effect on most of the soundtracks, really help towards creating the 'inner thoughts' and I really liked the effect they had on the video. It created a dark tone and helped towards presenting the mental illness in a respectable way.
• By having the advanced sound design, it has improved my video greatly, and I think it has improved my skill in presenting different moods and tones through the audio, not just through the imagery. 

What didn't work?

There weren't too many things that didn't work, but the few things that didn't go as planned were either in the planning stage or the editing stage.

• Planning & Editing
• There were a few ideas that I really wanted to try but I either didn't have the time or I didn't have the material to do so.
• I wanted the landscape image to eventually melt down the screen to go along with the line of "melting mascara". Once I had my landscape shot, I tried it out on after effects, but I couldn't get it to move down the screen. I tried multiple times and followed a few sites online to help, but it wasn't successful which was disappointing as I thought that idea would work quite well.
• In the end, I did have to replace this shot with another clip but I think it works so much better.
• However, the outcome of that shot is a lot better than the original idea, and I think it works well within the video.
• I also wanted to try double exposure for one of the lines about flames, but I didn't have the time to try it out before the shoot day, as I couldn't get the actress to come down earlier for any test shoots.
• Saying this, I thought the shot I now have for that specific line works really nicely due to the added text and the audio behind it.

What did I learn?

Within this unit, I have learnt:

• Research and planning is very important.
• Without any research into the topic of the project you won't get very far with your work. The research can help with the planning of the project and it can make a big impact on the visuals that may be seen throughout the video.
• I found that all of the research and planning I produced helped me greatly and it made me more confident about what topic I was exploring, both montages and depression.
• Creativity is important within montages and adaptations.
• In order to make montages work, and to make the original work your own, you have to have a creative mind and come up with a variety of different shots that really push you to improve your skill in filming and editing. 
• Adaptations are generally always hard to receive, but keeping the poem tone the same while interpreting the visuals and audio in your own way can help towards creating a successful adaptation. 

Overall, I'm really proud with the work I have produced and I have enjoyed working on this unit, even though it has been a really quick turn around. I think I have improved my skill in all the pre-production, production and the post-production, but mostly I think my editing skills have improved the most. This improvement has led to me feeling confident about presenting an emotion in other projects, and it's left me feeling confident about creating creative shots and montage sequences.

If I had more time, I would've liked to experiment more with the editing techniques for the visuals seen, but I'm really happy with the outcome of my video.

A Digital Critical Analysis | Digital News

Fine Cut Feedback | Development

After showing Helen and Sam my improved video, they thought it worked really well together and they really liked it. They said that it was eye catching and kept the audience engaged in the whole video.

The one thing Helen suggested was:

• Make the words 'I love you' shown in the letter, more prominent and make it gradually get brighter.
• To do this I had to split the adjustment layer, and add several keyframes on the brightness and the contrast levels. This meant that the words would gradually get brighter and due to the flash transitions that I added within the video, it makes it look brighter.
• I really like this effect and it emphasises the romantic suggestions that are presented through the character and the person who wrote the letter.

Rough Cut Feedback | Development

After showing Helen and Sam the rough cut of my video, they really liked it but gave me some feedback on a few things I could change and maybe add within the video.

• Change the landscape shot.
• I agreed with Helen and Sam on this point. We all thought it didn't really suit the rest of the video, and instead it needs to be either a not very nice looking building, or something with a bit more movement and stability. 
• I changed this shot to a clip of waves crashing against stones on a beach. I took this previously at Whitstable and I thought it fitted the poem a lot better than the last shot. 

• Make the sound build up so the end is very powerful.

• They thought the sound should build up throughout the video, so the ending is a lot more powerful. I agreed with this and decided to work backwards when making this improvement. 
• I started by adding loads of the different sound effects I had used previously in the video, and I layered them all on top of each other. I then carried a few of them forward so they start playing a little earlier than the second to last shot.
• I think this makes the video have a better build up in emotion, and also it helps keep the audience more engaged with the video itself. 

• The long shots need to be quicker and cut down - add some jump cuts.
• There are a few shots that are too long, and it makes the video slow down in speed. In order to keep the video at a fast pace I need to add more jump cuts in these long shots.
• During the filming I made sure to get more shots than I actually needed, so now I can add these shots to make a jump cut type of effect.

• Add some text for a few words in some of the lines of the poem.
• It was suggested that there were a few shots, like when Micaiah is sat with a lot of blank space around her, that should have some text added to it, so it's a bit more 'punchy' and keeps the audience's interest.
• I don't want this to ruin the video, so when adding the text, I made sure to change the blend mode to colour dodge. This added a static effect and it made the video more interesting while also giving it the 'punch' it needed in the empty background.

• Memory sequences & dream sequences need to be more over exposed.
• Helen wasn't too keen on the dream clips, but Sam suggested that if they were more over exposed then it would look better. Helen agreed with this, and I did also.
• I added the 'brightness & contrast' effect to these clips and made sure the brightness level is increased greatly, while the contrast was at a good level. With the effects I had already used in the clips, which were the 'Channel Blur' and the 'Gaussian Blur', it made the shot look so much better, and created a really nice contrast between the two different types of shots. 

Another suggestion that was made, was having the shots of Micaiah look similar to the colour in the Queen music video for 'Bohemian Rhapsody'. To do this I decreased the saturation a little more and I added the 'brightness and contrast' effect, and decreased the brightness while increasing the contrast. I  decided that I really liked the way this looked, and wanted to keep that sort of colour and look throughout the whole video.

Once the whole video was colour corrected the way I wanted it to be, I had to redo the rewind sequence due to the colour being different. I did the same thing as before and added it in to where it was before. Along with the sound effect to that video, it looks and sounds really good, and I think it's a good way to end the video.

I also added a few 'Dip to White' transitions to add a flash sort of effect between different shots, and with this I added a thunder sound effect to emphasise the transition.

Editing | Development

To start the editing process, I separated my footage and put them into bins to make it easier for me to find the clips that I need. I made sure to have a bin for my audio files, and bins for each location.

I then made sure that everything I needed in terms of footage was where it needed to be, and the settings were correct.

Firstly, I looked at my script and started to add the footage onto the timeline, in the order that they are in within the script. I also then took the audio of Micaiah speaking the poem, and split it up so each line could be adjusted in position and duration if necessary. From some of the clips, I found there was some ambience audio in the background, so I copied the audio and pasted it all throughout the length of the video.

For the quick changes of shots I layered the two different clips on top of each other and used the cut tool to cut the end of the clips into 6 different sections. I then deleted three from one clip and then the opposite three on the other clip. This then created a quick flash effect and with a sound effect added it would add to the impact of the tone I want to create with this transition. I did this transition a few times within the video as I thought it would move the video along at a quick pace and it kept the audience engaged in what is being shown in the video.

Since the video is very audio heavy, and the main importance of it is the sound design, I started to add some sounds to bring my footage to life.
I took the audio of Micaiah saying the extra dialogue I added into the scenes, and split them up so they were individual shots. I then moved them around and overlapped them so instead of it sounding like a conversation, it sounded more like words in the characters head. I then added an echo effect by adding the 'studio reverb' effect onto the audio. I changed the preset to 'vocal reverb (large)' and this created a really nice effect which created the sense of inner thoughts which was the aim.

To make some shots more real, I added sound effects, alongside the actual audio from the clip, to make it more obvious in a subtle way. For example; I added a raindrop sound effect to the clip of raindrops on the window. I also added a crackling candle effect to the shots with the candles in it to just to add more of an impact to the video. I did the same thing with the covers tossing and turning, and the water dripping out of the tap.
To create the sense of emotion and pain, I added a variety of female crying sound effects and again added the 'studio reverb' to make them sound like an inner thought. And to add to this I added a breathless sound effect in order to create a sense of panic with links in with the actual mental illness that is being presented.

To add to the fast cut transition, I found a sound effect that sounds like a flash. The actual noise of a camera shutter, but I thought this sound was subtle and worked nicely with the transition. There's a high pitched type of sound at the beginning of the sound effect that adds nicely to the video as it makes the audio quite distorted and interesting.
I used a lot of layers for this sound effect as I wanted it to be consistent within those certain transitions in the video.

Also, in the bathroom footage, there was originally a dull noise, and I decided to use that audio throughout the whole video. This helped with the distorted effect running throughout the whole video.

Since all of the visuals and the audio files were in the right places, I moved onto creating the rewind at the end of the video. To do this I created a new sequence and copied the visuals from the main sequence into the new one. I then worked from the end of the video and reversed each clip one by one. This was quite tricky as I had to adjust the position of the clips in order to make it play backwards. Once I had completed that, I exported it and added it to the blank space it was meant to go in. It was sped up to fit the gap, and now it looks like the video is playing backwards which is what I wanted. Instead of using a rewind sound, I used a dull static sound so it wasn't silent and it created an increase in the sound design, which would then create a panic sort of impact.

Once the audio had been completed, and the sound effects had been layered upon each other and had an echo type of effect, I moved onto the colour of the video. I added an adjustment layer and used the 'three-way colour correcter' wheel to create the desaturated effect I wanted for my visuals. I adjusted the input and the output levels, to make the shot look slightly darker while keeping Micaiah's face apparent.

Before the rough cut viewing, I had all of the clips and the audio in place, however the colour correcting hadn't been completed all the way through. For some of the 'dream' sequences I made sure to used a tested version of the colour correcting so Helen and Sam knew what I wanted the shot to look like in the end.