The media was directly imported as opposed to AMA linking it as we wanted optimum performance during our edit sessions, and compatibility in case we needed to switch between platforms.

At this point some basic separation was done in to a main and a pickups bin.

Also i gave Rob some notes on each shot to help him out with the edit.

PROBLEMS:

At this stage however Rob encountered some major technical difficulties with his copy of Media Composer resulting in his project file and backup files being damaged, and due to some other personal matters he had to be relieved of his position as an editor.

Due to these events i had to use an old copy of the project file that only had the notes saved, in order to start again and try and complete the edit myself.

Also i learned that i had to become editor the day before we had to show a progress update to Anne. This meant that i had to try and do a rough assembly edit during our lunch break.

Thankfully as we had transcoded all the media and correctly backed up this version of the project, opening it on my own computer was not a problem.

Also, due to the fact that Rob had already marked In and Out points on most of the shots, it was pretty easy to select shots from the bin and splice them in using the V key on the keyboard.

This was the resulting timeline from that rough assembly edit

Even though this edit roughly gave an overview of the order of the shots, the pace and timing were completely off. However Anne said we were on a good track and gave some very good feedback.

She said that the shots in the beginning may need trimming down, just keeping the shots of the phone frames would be ok, and also overall trimming and pacing.

Out of our group meeting another great idea was to extend the opening shot with a long tracking from the distance to show all of the phones that the man previously had.

TRIMMING THE EDIT:

Now came time to fix the timing issues and try to get an overall good trimmed edit that ran at roughly 1-2 minutes.

I started by marking bits of clips with the in and out points, and then using the Extract tool to cut bits out. I also used the trim tool on some cuts to do slight frame cuts.

After a bit of tinkering around this is what i got:


Even though it still isn't completely refined, i have to lock it mostly now to export this edit for other things such as Visual Effects, Color Grading and Sound Editing and Mixing. The good thing is that if i need to trim down something i can still do that after everything else.

COLOR GRADING AND EFFECTS:

Before going to color grade, just to test if the green screen worked i tried using the specramatte effect on some of the clips, and saw that the greenscreen even though it wasn't perfect, it was ok to pull a decent key.

For the color grading Shahid offered to help out, therefore we went to the Avid Symphony room to continue the edit.

Now at this stage no visual effects were ready, so the grade was done using the original footage. However as it's easy to transfer effects over from clips, that didn't worry me as all i had to do later on is open up the effects editor, and drag the color corrector icon over to a new clip.

The direction i gave to shahid is that i wanted it slightly cooler, but i wanted to preserve the vibrance and warmth of the skin tones and the floor.

Overall i enjoyed seeing the results, and i thought that i would give him loose directions and correct slightly as we were going along as i wanted my colourist to have freedom in adding his own touch.

VISUAL EFFECTS:

The Visual Effects were quite an interesting challenge, as they required a number of different techniques, such as chroma keying, 3D tracking, image based modeling, and more.

One thing that was quite useful and saved me lots of rendering time was a tip i learned in the 3D workshops.

As rendering a single shot could take up to 2 days, i needed to find a way to speed up this time dramatically

I did this by "baking", a technique that allows me to pre-calculate the lighting and materials, and "bake" them in to an image that gets used as a texture on low-poly mesh.

This also meant that i could use the GPU to render the shots, since they didn't require complicated calculations any more.

This made the 2 day shot render in about 5 minutes.

SOUND:

For the sound after i got a clean ambient track and a narration recording of the ad from Ulysses i spliced them in on extra mono tracks i created.



After setting my reference tone to -18db using the Audio Tool and adjusting the levels using the Audio Mixer, to make the narration sound like it was coming from the TV i used an equalizer to cut off the highs and lows, and a reverb to give it some space.




To make the Apple inspired ad sound right, i purchased some royalty free music from audionetwork.com that resembled the apple tech demo music.

I decided that during the closeup of him realizing his mistake i wanted the audio to become non-diegetic, as if we're going in to his thought process and we can feel his intensity somehow. To do this i simply increased the volume over time using the track handles, and adding keyframes with the ' key.

Also to further balance my sound levels i added a compressor/limiter to the master track, limiting everything to -12db and keeping normal sounds roughly at -18db.

TITLES AND CLOCKS:

To create the ending credits i made a new title using the Avid Title Tool, and chose to use some simple rolling credits.

After all of the text was created and positioned, i rendered the title to my media drive, and spliced it in at the end of my project

To add the bars and tone at the beginning i imported the bars from the supporting files foler, found the clock from an earlier production and created some more titles with the information. To create a start filler with the right timecode i used the "Add filler at start command" to add 40 seconds of filler (10 for bars and 30 for the clock). Therefore the film starts at exactly 01:00:00:00.

EXPORTING:

Final Timeline

After finishing the edit fully, copying all of the color effects to the new vfx shots, and double checking everything i decided to export.

To export i used the Avid DnXHD 185 codec. I used 8 bit as the camera was not shooting 10 bit files, so that would be unnecessary.

REFLECTIONS:



Overall even though the editing process was a bit last minute, i enjoyed it and for the amount of time given i am happy with the result. If i could change something however, i would choose to communicate more with my team to avoid some of the confusion that made this project so last minute. Lastly i'm also going to attempt to continue my edit of the Silent Woods project to further gain experience in editing using avid, thankfully though i've started using avid for personal projects and so far it seems to fit in with my pipeline. Let's see how this goes...

Using avid for personal projects seems to be a good way to train myself

Looking back at the footage, i believe we did quite a good job as a team.

Even though i've learned quite allot about directing on this project, the main thing that i've learned is working within and managing a large team.

Giving people responsibilities (and re-assigning them if a crew member fails to keep up) was a very important part, and making sure everyone's opinions are heard, but don't clash with the original intentions of the project was hard, but necessary to avoid arguments that could compromise the project.

Also making sure that our pre-production was adequate helped us allot with the actual shoot since we had a rough mental image in our heads about what we were making. This also helped with mine and the crew's confidence during shooting.

All i can say is that i'm glad i worked on this with everyone, and can't wait until post production next year.

Lastly, and most importantly as you can see we had fun together as a crew during the set build/shoot:

Monday morning started with getting the kit set up, testing out shots, camera moves and making sure everything was ready on the shoot day.

The main lighting issues that needed to be sorted were:

• The TV's blue light
• The actors modeling light

Also i needed to get comfortable with the samurai blade since it would be my main monitor to view and review each take.

A cool feature i found was the ability to choose scene and shot names, this would help Rob find the takes matching the shot list, since the names would be eg. DFSA_S002_S010_T004 (Scene 2, Shot 10, Take 4)

The main camera move the crew rehearsed was the establishing master shot, since we were using the Moviola for a relatively complex move.

Also it was good to have an extra day to sort things out since some of the equipment was not working correctly (the Blade had some power supply issues), therefore we had enough time to get the technicians to look at it.

Lastly, we shot some pickups of the set to help with the edit.

Tuesday Morning everyone was called in at 9 to prepare the set.

Aaron (our actor) was originally going to show up at 9:30, with Julia showing him to the studio but he showed up early, therefore i greeted him, showed him to the green room and went over the day's schedule with him.

Thankfully Julia had bought water bottles, tea, coffee and snacks the day before, so we could provide these to the actor.

Set up only lasted about half an hour since everything was ready from the day before.

As i was making sure that everything was being set up properly, Julia who had now arrived introduced herself to the actor and explained the payment details.

After everything was set up and ready, it was time to call the actor in.

According to our shoot schedule, we were to shoot the master establishing shot first as one go.

With the actor in position, i asked him first to do a test run just to get used to the set environment, and the blocking. This was also useful for the rest of the crew because camera moves could be refined, the microphone could be better placed, etc...

After the first pass i gave some corrections to the camera crew, suggesting that i could give them cues for each move, and i let Aaron know what i like from his initial performance, and what i wanted to be adjusted.

After each successive take the same process went on to try and get the best shot possible. Some happy accidents even occurred in takes, for example as Aaron was leaving the set towards the end, he paused, turned back and then looked at the phone before finally leaving. This spontaneous bit of performance was just pure gold, and i decided to add it in the pickups as a closeup.

After the master was shot, the actor was sent back to the green room whilst the camera crew changed lenses. This gave me some time to watch the footage and see if i had missed anything.

The closeups were done in a similar fashion, where after each take minor corrections would be made to both the crew and Aaron. Sometimes even if a take was perfect, if Aaron was up for it we'd shoot it again to have some flexibility in post.

After lunch, we got back to doing pickups. Here i asked rob if i could take control of the camera to try out a few things (only for the pickup shots), and since he was ok with it, i just tried a couple of takes with different movements/angles.

During the set being swapped around, i had noticed that we were way ahead of schedule. This was really useful since swapping the lights around had it's complications (thankfully Harry, Rob and Anne did a great job with solving problems).

Unfortunately, Rob received an electric shock from the equipment, so i took over operating and asked Rob to break for a bit.

The next shots were done in the same manner as the previous, only before the actor came on set we had rehearsed the moves with Lauren or Anne as stand ins.

Also for some of the closeups the tracking markers were re-arranged in order to get a better track from such a tight shot.

Lastly we did some sound takes as Ulysses had asked us to.

"aaannnd.... that's a Wrap!"

Shooting ended successfully with me pleased at all of the shots we got, and the amount of effort from the entire team.

I went on to congratulate the actor on his performance, and show him some of the dailies before he followed Julia and Rosie for his payment.

Since the actor had left now, the equipment was being put aside in their bags ready for the next group, the files were being copied to a hard drive and the flooring was being disassembled.

It was sad to see the now incomplete set with all the studio lights off and the equipment packed away, but i can say it was definitely worth it.

The use of a lens adapter is pretty self explanatory: More creative possibilities, shallower depth of field...

But the external recorder solved a major issue that the camera's built in recording medium has: Compression

Because the image is coming out of a clean SDI signal, and is being compressed using Apple ProRes instead of the build in XDCAM cards, the result is a much more usable image when it comes to post production.

This is really important to us as we will be using Greenscreen, so we need as much information as possible.

Also, the Samurai Blade allows for shot favorites, therefore i can pick my best takes as they are happening, and that metadata will appear in the edit.

In general, i now feel relatively comfortable with this kit, and so does Rob (Cinematographer).

After Ryan had left, me, Lauren and Dowan discussed what we liked and what we didn't like, and shared notes.

Unfortunately, Ryan was the only applicant to appear out of the 4 we were expecting.

This was a lesson learned: Always cast as many people you can from as many different sources you can

This was probably one of our biggest mistakes as we only cast applicants using StarNow.

Lastly, one more applicant requested another day for auditioning as he was unavailable on the audition days, so we arranged a skype conversation/audition.

Even though this method seemed a bit strange at first, it seemed adequate as the same methods used above worked (substitute filming with recording the screen)

Even though we only have two auditions at the moment, it's still going to be a tough decision...