Fiction Adaptation: Editing & FXs

Will I Be Using Any Interesting Effects?

As well as general editing the film together, I will also be using a number of effects to help convey emotion as well as to generally enable the narrative to seem more dramatic and flow better. These can be seen below where I'll also show you how I done it.

"One by One" War Flashes

In my script, I've mentioned that I wanted war footage to flash up when she writes "one by one". This is mainly because I feel that introducing flashes of the war early on in my film will help to give an idea to the audience as to what will be coming up, as well as it reflecting well as she writes "one by one" as it almost shows the grittiness it created. So to do this, I added the footage which I'll be using on top of the "one by one" where I will then be adding key frames and altering the opacity of the frame.  This was simply done by setting 3 key frames: one at the start, middle and end. The opacity will start on nothing then reach maximum opacity halfway through the clip, before returning back to 0%. This makes the image suddenly appear and 'flash' on screen whilst remaining parallel with the "one by one".

Here you can see the footage vaguely on screen

As well as this, I then added the 'flashing' effect purely to emphasise this idea of the footage flashing. As well as this, it makes it a lot easier to see the footage and helps to create enigmas as you can only see it for a brief moment.

The effect I used can be seen on the right

Motion Blur - Male Character Fading Away

For this part of my film, I aim to make my male character to fade off the clip, which visually is metaphorical for him fading away as he is killed and 'lost' at war.  To enable this to happen, I needed two main clips, which are:

    - A shot of the location without him or anyone in it.

    - Him walking down the road, the exact same frame as the previous shot.

Luckily, I had a clip of just the location which was around 2-3 seconds long, which I then  extended by looping it to enable this effect to work. Nonetheless, I  split up the shot of him walking down the street into 3 sections: At the beginning, middle and end of the path he walks down. 

I named the shot of just the path 'Opacity Loop' (the master shot)

To show this transition, these 3 split up clips should then be spread across the master shot. Their opacity now needs to be altered. so that the shot fades in then fades out. This enables my male character to 'fade away' plus showing him walking down the path. To do this, I used 3 key frames and followed the same method as my "one by one" effect. These enable him to firstly come into shot, then leave the shot by fading.

The master shot

Below you can just see him fade away as he walks down the street, which was done by using key frames.

The male character is fading away

As the master shot is quite a wide shot, I decided to crop it down to make the fading seem more effective. Now that the master is cropped, I then had to do the same to all the other shots otherwise the fade will jump and won't look very consistent. So, I made sure all shots had the same cropping dimensions shown in the image below:

All frames should have the same crop dimensions to make the fade effect look consistent.

Adding a 'Cinematic' Feel

Whilst I was looking through my first draft, I realised that some shots lighting and colour could've been balanced slightly as they tended to have a yellow tone (especially in the scene where my female character finds out about the death of her husband). This is where I then came up with the idea of giving this scene a slight 'cinematic' feel - I wanted to give it a sort of darkening effect despite it being filmed during the day, purely just to emphasise her loneliness and sadness.

So to do this, I needed to alter the exposure and colouring levels of each shot. I also used the colour 'balance' tool plus slightly brought down the exposure as you can see in the shots below. For the exposure, I bought down shadows and highlights so that there is a slightly larger amount of black in the frame due to the shadows.

As you can see the image above, the image has been darkened to enable these emotions to be effective. However, it is slightly too dark and the grass has a yellow tint, which is why I enabled the colour 'balance' analysis to commence

Once I had finished editing the colour/lighting for one shot, I then created a preset called 'LONELY'. This was then added to each shot in this scene so that it remains consistent. Of course, some shots had to  be edited slightly due to their not being a consistent amount of light, however once I finished this they all generally flowed well together and there wasn't any noticeable changes with the lighting/colour.

Below is a picture before and after the edit. You can see that the white balance is much better and the image is slightly darker. A fair bit of light has been removed however the shot is still effecitve - it looks more bland which works well as this helps to reinforce her loneliness, as the bland colour could be metaphorical for her emptiness.

Before...

After!