Production Blog: Cutting and Dubbing

 I continued editing over the past weekend, and a lot of things were done. I had to re-do the zoom effect when Bernadette puts on her lipstick because it disappeared for whatever reason. in order to prevent this from happening again, I opened up a new project in ShotCut, placed only the necessary clip in the timeline, and added the effect. Then I exported the video and replaced the clip in my project for my intro with the new one I had just made. I made a lot of significant changes to my project, the biggest of which was cutting footage. When I initially put in all of my footage and cut every clip down as much as I could, it was still nearly 3 1/2 minutes. I was going to have to cut a few clips in order to get my film under the two-minute mark. Which is a shame because I spent quite a bit of time filming what I cut out. I cut the clip where Francesca walks past the camera, The graphic match of the door slamming (this one wasn't a major loss, it looked pretty bad), the scene of Francesca writing the letter, and the corresponding close-up of said letter. The biggest loss was the entirety of the original ending, everything after the zoom where Bernadette and Francesca hold hands was cut. I am disappointed this happened, as I spent a lot of time filming and writing and planning for this. But ultimately I do not think it is a massive loss, as it was somewhat frivolous, and gave the intro a conclusion I don't think was entirely necessary. However, because it was cut, I will have to move some of the credits to earlier in the intro. 

One of the big issues I noticed with editing was inconsistent sound quality. I am moderately familiar with audio editing, but I know how time-consuming it is, so have talked to my actors, for an easier option. They are going to re-record their lines, based on their diction and tone in the original audio, and I will dub over the film with that recording. This also means I am going to have to look into some sound effects, but that is almost certainly going to be easier than spending hours upon hours trying to level out the audio. The final thing I did to edit my film thus far was converting it to black and white like many old films. I did this by turning the saturation all the way down, removing any color from the video.