Production Blog: Finishing up Filming and Starting Editing

 We continued filming on Thursday, March 25th, which was slightly off schedule, but ultimately worked for the best as we were able to spend some time to recuperate. Also importantly, my phone suddenly stopped working on Tuesday. Luckily my footage from the previous day's filming was backed up but in terms of new footage, I was a sitting duck. One of my actor's generously let me use her phone for filming on the 25th so I would not need to further postpone the project. We filmed all of the outdoor scenes that we were not able to on Thursday in rapid succession. Starting and ending earlier than expected. I changed the location from the street shown In my planning blog to a pathway behind my apartment building. This was because couldn't figure out how to keep the towel out of the shot, but also want to prevent road rash and the fear of cars slowing down filming or even worse, potentially injuring someone. The pathway allowed us to film on softer ground and gave us a more interesting background than just the street would have been. I filmed Bernadette and Francesca's meeting in under two hours.

I filmed the close-up of the clock and letter and got to work editing on the 29th, dumping all of my footage into ShotCut. In my planning blog I mentioned using Lightworks to edit, this was an error on my part, while writing the blog I confused the two programs as I have them both downloaded, but I am much more familiar with ShotCut, and will thus be using it to edit. This is a departure from previous projects where I used OpenShot, but I think for this introduction, ShotCut will ultimately work better. ShotCut allows for me to color grade easily, which will be useful as I want my film to be in black and white, but the tint of my lighting is not consistent, color-grading will allow me to keep the film in black and white with consistent looking lighting. 

I began editing on the 29th, and for the most part it went as planned. Cutting and putting together various clips and adding transitions. The real trouble came when I attempted to add a zoom in post. The mechanical zoom in I did on Bernadette's lips was shaky and bad. Luckily I flmed an additional non-zoom shot with the expectation that I could simply zoom in post. I was right about it being possible, but it certainly was not easy. The lips were not in the exact center of the shot so the zoom filter did not center on them, which was not my goal. I was able to readjust the zoom to where I was happy with the lips' place in frame, but only after 3 hours of work and the program crashing multiple times.