Editing

 This is the editing for our documentary made by Jocelyn.

Issues:

All of our clips start with our clapperboards to show the scene number and number of takes, which would help us a lot when it came to editing, as we could find our best clips and put it in editing really quickly. However, when I input all the clips into my editing software (Microsoft Clipchamp), none of the clapperboards were shown in the thumbnail (one did, but that’s one out of hundreds of other clips) so it was harder for me to see which clips were which. 

Editing app (microsoft clipchamp) lags out often, it takes longer to make changes to the edit. Fortunately for the most part, the app runs smoothly and all goes well, but sometimes there’s a chance the software lags out and makes the editing process slower.

Premiere pro and davinci isn’t loading on my laptop and i dont have the time to wait for it to load/work (playing it safe cuz deadline stinks - using the crappy free editing software i normally use)

Process

Scene 1 (All background audios are found and researched by my teammates Jasmine and Rachelle)

Sound:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UTRApG_9kY&list=PL_jsUlLsYUHrVuGhz-91VNcx-KGTIioPv&index=6 - Gathering Darkness by Kevin Macleod

I first tried an audio from youtube called “Gathering Darkness” by Kevin Macleod, but I felt like it was more like a creepy lullaby than it was an introduction to a crime documentary. Rather than feeling like a retelling of a horrible crime, it sounded more like a cinematic to a short horror film, which makes the audience lose the idea that this documentary was about a terrible crime that had happened, and instead get the idea that this is just a creepy story being told. We don’t want this effect as obviously we don’t want the audience to be out of touch with a real life crime.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zvQoPyY2XE “Dark tension rising music” by Mattia Cupelli

The second audio I tried was “Dark tension rising music” by Mattia Cupelli on youtube. I think this audio induces more anxiety and tension than it did the last, as it wasn’t as loud and overexaggerated as Gathering Darkness by Kevin Macleod. I matched the text for the intro to our documentary to come in at the beat dropping on 0:11 seconds into the youtube video, I had also cut off a few seconds in the start as the text in our intro only appears for a total of 10 seconds, and audio’s intro on youtube was too long.

Video:

The part of the scene where Devasya (our actor for Christopher) walks through the streets to revisit Harper’s house, the scene of the crime, I wanted to put a time and date in the bottom left corner of the screen pointing out that Christopher is with a camera crew to film a documentary, after the crime has happened. 

This was the first font I chose, at first glance I thought it fit the scene and it looked like code on a computer, the way I wanted it to look like. However, after I looked over the editing, I realized it was too bubbly and just didn’t look right.

This was the second font I chose, one of the other reasons I didn’t like the first typeface was because I didn’t like how the zeros in the text had a dot in the center of it. This typeface with just a strike through the zeros looked a lot better on screen and the overall look of the typeface didn’t seem too bubbly.

Scene 2.2 (Harper places her bag on a chair)

My team and I tried out a different angle to see if it would look better. 

Originally I preferred this first angle better, because it showed Rachelle (as Harper’s reenactment actor) walking into the frame and placing her bag on the chair. Post-filming however, when I played through the various clips we shot for this scene, I realized the lighting wasn’t on our side when it came to this angle. The backlight from the window was too bright and made the rest of the scene look darker, and it just didn’t make sense to use this.

I looked around for that other angle we tried out, and using this clip just made more sense. The backlight wasn’t against us, and the overall scene isn’t too bright or too dim (both pictures of the scenes aren’t color graded, these are the raw clips). I decided on using this version of the angle instead.

Harper’s main interview

The interview footage is taken from a news report that was live days after the “kidnapping”. I struggled to find a news template that looks good when edited onto the raw recording - I don’t have the Capcut application so I decided to find templates online in google. The problem with this however, is that the template would be still pictures and not animated.

This is one of the few templates I chose. Though it’s mostly because it looks bad and I could’ve chosen a better template for an example, I noticed the news template that are just still pictures would just look awkward on screen.

One of my teammates, Cheryl, has capcut and knows her way around it. However, we saw that all the news templates in capcut were short in duration, and the interview video is a total of 1 minute and 50 seconds (most of the templates in capcut were barely reaching 20 seconds). Picture below is taken from Cheryl’s capcut app.

This was the first template that was chosen. I commented on it and mentioned that the white borders above and below the screen didn’t look good, and ended up making the size of the frame look so squished. Another issue we had on this one was that this was the longest news template Cheryl had found on capcut, and it was only a minute long.

In the end, we ended up scrapping this as we were in a pinch for time so we ended up not using any news logo. Using this template would also obstruct too much of the clip so it would be a bit distracting.

 

The next thing to fix was the problem with the color. I’m not sure why but I’ve tried to import the file for Harper’s interview multiple times already but the color keeps on becoming super desaturated and yellow-ish. I tried to color grade to make the colors pop out better like the original video clip.

I accidentally made it a bit too cool-toned which will be bad for continuity since the color of the clip needs to be the same as the one playing on the TV interview clip.

I got rid of most of the cool tones so I think this is the best I could get to make it as similar as possible to the original. I do think that the pink tones from the original clip have disappeared and the contrast also increased quite a bit. Thankfully, it still looks natural.

Scene 4

For the scene where Harper walks down the staircase, we started shooting the scene at around 6 pm, which was an hour too late. The sun had started to go down and it ended up looking like there was a time skip from day to night. We planned another shoot and started recording hours earlier, however before we did another shoot, I tried to fix the lighting myself but the color grading ended up ruining the overall look of the scene.

First shooting:

Second shooting:

I’m glad we had a reshoot for scene 4, there was a window behind where my camera was placed at (refer to the pictures on Behind the Scene photos on Day 7), and the difference in time of day made Rachelle (our teammate and actor for Harper’s reenactment scenes) appear in a different shade and color, whilst the background stayed the same. The colors just looked off on the first shoot, Rachelle was in a darker blue tone as it was darker outside, and in the second shoot she was filmed on a different day but roughly the same time that the previous reenactment scene was shot at.

Ending Scene:

Jasmine and I discussed the title card and previously, we thought that it would be good to make the thumbnail and the title card have the same image, but after reviewing other crime documentary openings, this would not fit the genre at all. Instead, Jasmine went ahead and made some backgrounds that we could use for the title card. There are two mock ups, one with the blood splatter effect and one without. We decided that it would be a good idea to use a picture of the neighborhood as the background as it would almost answer the question of where Christopher went.

With the blood splatter.

Without the blood splatter. We decided to use this one so it wouldn’t look too crowded.

Reflection

A majority of this was done a few hours before the deadline and we all had to wait until almost 6am for the whole editing and final outcome to be finished. At this point, I was very nauseous and felt myself genuinely about to puke. We had not gotten any sleep at all. This was honestly just the worst part of the whole project as we all just started getting angry at each other and arguing due to the stress and pressure, as well as the sleep deprivation. Honestly, I would want to try out a new group of teammates next time and pick out people who would actually get the job done without having to deprive us from our sleep.