Talking about the challenge itself, in the beginning of the session we were convinced we had a lot of footage from the Turrets location. “We definitely have at least 4 versions of the transition” - we all agreed before we even opened Adobe. However it turned out that there were just a couple elf transition shots, which all had their flows. One was too shaky (because the shot was handheld), another one didn’t move close enough to Jul’s hair, the third was too slow etc. We chose the best option we had and tried stitching it with the shots from Turrets. Due to the fact that in the first location the lighting was warm and in the second it was cold (even blue), we had to apply a crossfade to smooth out this contrast. Later on we were playing around with the POV and mid-shots we made. On the shoot day we also tried collecting footage in 25 frames per second to make the action slow-mo. However, when we saw what it looks like alongside all other shots, we decided not to use it, because it made the action discontinuous and a bit odd. More to that that clip would take up too much time, which we couldn’t afford, as the duration of our sequence was already too long. The mid-shots didn’t fit well too, because the “jump” from the POV to the angle we recorded the mid shot from was too small, which therefore made the action abrupt. This is where we started getting concerned, because it meant the only workable footage from Turrets we had were a couple of POVs and two transition (back to reality) shots. We then made a decision to keep the flashback short, which would make a lot of sense - it is a flashback not an actual story, it was supposed to be a plot-twist rather than a significant part of the narrative and our sequence. That’s why we kept one transition into the flashback and one POV only. We then had to stitch the transition “back into reality” which was a big disappointment for me personally. The mid shot, where the camera moves to an ECU to young Jul’s hair looked extremely unnatural. Both the real mom and the younger Juls were in a static position and with a straight face, which made it look very unrealistic and in my opinion reduced the quality of our product.
We were limited in time, which is why we decided to set this problem aside and move on (we kept that transition as it was). It was time for the part where the fake mom comes closer to the disturbed Juls and tells her they “have to go to school”. We had a lot of footage of that part particularly, however half of it was not useable, because on the shoot day we made a mistake of not connecting the microphone before making the shots. Thankfully back to that day we realised it half way through and reshot everything with the microphone. That’s why we selected a few shots with good sound quality that would work for the finale of our sequence. Unfortunately, we only had time to insert one mid shot of the fake mom and here the session was over. We then planned to complete that part during the Wednesday free time/activities slots and start the sound on Thursday as we planned.
A couple of hours later I went to the editing suit (Zoe and Isi were on a Theatre trip, which is why they were unable to join) in order to finish the video part of the sequence and make sure we are on track. After chatting with Tom and asking him for a piece of advice, I decided to get rid of the unnatural “transition back to reality” part and just cut one scene to another. It already did look better. I then tried applying different effects/transitions in Adobe with one of them being a “spiral motion”, which actually fitted perfectly. I then stitched a long shot of the fake mom approaching Juls with an over-the-shoulder of her sitting down and a close-up on Juls eyes, which was actually the ending. As we planned the last shot was a close-up on Jul’s eyes, which close and the screen goes black with a title of the movie on it. Now that the video sequence was finished, my only concern was the duration of the clip, which was 2.23 minutes. I had to reduce is by at least eight seconds. I started by deleting the unnecessary clips: for example, we had three pan mid shots of the room with one of them not setting the ambiance significantly, which is why I got rid of it. Moreover, I went through each video and reduced the majority by a tiny bit (making sure it doesn’t affect continuity). After competing this process, our video became 2.13 minutes long which was perfect. At this point we are ready to start editing the sound and thinking about all the credits and titles we are going to add to our sequence.
This is the video from the morning session (first paragraph):
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