We planned out film by created a shot list and a storyboard so we could delegate task to each of us in the group. Having the story board and shot list helped us to know what we were doing and to keep to a plan.
Production
The production mainly consisted of two elements. ‘Found/Archive footage’ and ‘Filming’ we split up the tasks between everyone so we all had certain clips of archive footage to find on youtube and from other sources and also shots we needed to go out and film .
These are all the folders of archive footage that we have obtained. There are multiple videos in each folder.
This is the footage that we took. As we filmed it we separated it straight into separate folders so the post production process would become easier.
Post production
The post production editing of this film took a long time. I didn’t anticipate how long it would take to look through all of the archive footage and choose what I wanted to use. I had to be ruthless as most of the time I had to choose a very shot couple second clip from a whole video which could sometimes be 10 minutes in length. Overall, I really enjoyed editing this film. I really like the topics we chose and I think that we successfully made a film through the use of filming and editing which shows the comparison between the WW2 and the current pandemic.
1. Layout/ Structure
First I created the sequence, which was a 3840 by 2160 size frame and at 25 frames per second. Then I imported Churchill’s Speach into the timeline. I cut it into sections I liked to try and get an idea of the way the film was gonna pan out.
This is one of the early timelines, I split the 2 minute timeline into 6 scenes all 20 seconds each. I put in a title of each scene to help structure the video and keep to our story board. I used keynote to create these scene titles. By putting in these scene markers it helped me to gauge how much footage i needed for each section which increase productivity and really helped my workflow when editing.
2. Footage
This is one of the early timelines from when I was putting all the footage together. A lot more footage was added later on as I wanted the film to be much faster paced to coincide with the pace of the coronavirus.This is the finished timeline. I tried to structure it and label the tracks in a way that was easy to work with and not to difficult to see what was going on. For all the archive footage from the war I chose to put a white clean plate underneath all the WW2 footage to. act as a boarder as all the WW2 clips were a 4:3 aspect ratio whereas the modern standard is 16:9. This helped the old archive footage to stand out.
3. Text/Graphics
I used keynote to produce the graphics for the Title and end credits. I found it easier and quicker this way. Also, Key note has a good animation feature where I could set the text to appear on screen as if it was being typed. I could then export the slides as movie files so I could import them into premiere. I chose a text font that looked like a typewriter because I felt that it went best with the style of video we were making with all the archive footage.
Once I imported the animation of the text appearing into premiere, I found a sound effect I liked of keys being pressed on a typewriter. I subscribe to a platform called epidemic sound which is where i got all the sound effects for this video. I then cut up the audio track of the typewriter and then matched every click of a key to what was visible on screen this was quite a long and tedious process especially for the end credits with more letters. However, I was very happy with the outcome.
4. Audio
The Audio in this film is probably the most important part in terms of bringing the film together, and creating the mood. The song we chose was from the Starwars The Clone Wars and the track was called ‘Buring the Dead’ The song title was relevant to the film but we felt that the song worked extremely well with out vision for the film. The centre piece of the audio was ‘Churchill’s Fight on the Beaches’ speech. I opened the film with a montage of news reports about Covid and Donald Trump. I also included bits of boris Johnson’s speech on going into lockdown, a snipit from Freedom Church’s online service and the queens speech about covid.
This is a screenshot of all the audio in the film. Track 1 was Churchill’s speach. Track 2 was all the news reports and the type writer for the credits. Track 3 was a snippet from one of the queens speaches. And track 4 was the song we chose. This is Churchill’s speech. I made changes to this right up until the end. I cut it up, deleted sections, and rearranged it to suit the story we were trying to tell. When the song begins to build, I started to introduce the ‘We will fight…’ parts of the speech and then when the music slows at the end I chose to put the bits where he talks about going on till the end. I think that using Churchill’s speech was effective in trying to communicate our message.
5. Colour
I don’t have a lot of experience colour grading video, I found it quite difficult and i did not grade every clip. With more time I would have tried to match all the footage that we took and found from during the pandemic. What I did do was make primary corrections and get all the footage to a good neutral base. This meant tweaking the exposure, highlights, shadows and contrast to make the clips either brighter or darker.
