Minor Project - Michael Reynolds Edit

During the minor project module I also helped out fellow student Michael Reynolds, edit his final piece for minor. Mic was working on a short horror film, trying to display horror tropes and what scares and builds suspense. He filmed all his shots and got all his footage done quite quick but wanted my help in editing the final piece, due to his lack of experience and knowledge in Avid and editing. I agreed to help him but with his minor work been how to create and build suspense and such, I was only there to assist with the collecting and editing of the piece, whereas Mic needed to make the cuts and let me know exactly what he wanted, I needed to stay creatively bias from his work.

Mic brought me all his footage and I imported it all on to the computer and then into Avid. Once I had gathered the footage in Avid we sat down and watched all the clips so I could know which were the ones he wanted to use and which were useless to his project. After we sorted out a folder with all the useable clips, I transcoded and consolidated and we began the edit process. Mic would tell me which clip and shot we wanted to use and whereabouts in the clip to cut before adding it to the timeline, we then carried this on until we built up a good rough cut of the edit, and played it back and then tightened it up. Certain areas of the video didn't go to as Mic had planned, and so he made changes and cut around bits to improve its quality and make it flow better, but overall the piece still achieved what he set out to do, and was a whole collective piece by the end.

Once the cut had been completed, their were certain effects and titles Mic wanted me to add to the footage before it was exported. We started off with fade transitions here and there throughout the whole video and added a title credit on the intro of the films title. For one of the clips in particular of the grim reaper, Mic wanted it speeded up so I used the motion effect editor to make the clip faster to the point Mic has happy with it. Other work I did on the project was adding and editing audio and sound effects in the piece, making sure it all synced up with the visuals and that it faded in and was to the correct audio level. I also used some superimposing effects over a ghost appearance scene to give the effect there was more ghosts and played a couple of similar clips over the top of each other which gave an interesting effect that Mic really liked. I also added end credits to the piece to finish it off before it was exported. Once the overall piece was to Mic's standards I exported the video and Mic was able to use it in his presentation and to hand in.

Minor Project - The Conjuring 2 Edit

The forth and final clip I was editing for my minor project was The Conjuring 2 (2016). This clip is taken from a horror film, and gives a very intense and suspenseful performance from all aspects and areas of the footage. It's very eery and uses both its audio and visuals to pull in it's audience and to scare them at the end. The scene itself is quite isolated and features a young girl watching television alone, when things start to get unusual. For this specific piece I used the footage of the clip on three different layers, with the first been the original and the other two able to edit on. With the clip being a horror film, I wanted to give the edit and very olden feel but I also didn't wanna add to the suspense or help the horror film in anyway. I added very small but noticeable scanlines to the piece and cut off the sides of the piece, using the left to right tool. I used the border control effect and removed the edges and sides of the clip and had the original footage playing underneath, giving a sharp distinction where the two clips meet. I also cut directly down the middle of the clip, and took away a lot of the colour from the right side, almost making it black and white, while the left side still had complete colour. After adjusting and changing certain aspects of the colour already, I decided to apply my colour effect technique and make minimal changes to the colour, just enough to take away some of the eeriness that the clip has earned.

In an effort to break tension, but my have ultimately done the opposite, I added cuts in between the footage, some short, some longer, and this was cutting to black throughout the clip while the sound was still playing. This was to raise frustration out of the audience that they can hear but can completely not see what is happening in such a tense situation.

After finishing on the visual adjustments to the clip, I moved on to alter the audio for the piece. Audio is so important in horror films and there is no exception here. The audio is quite and important element in this piece and I wanted to take that away from the clip completely. Many horror films are known for using infrasound in their films to create suspense and make the audience uncomfortable so I wanted to cancel this out. I used an audio file of airplane cabin sounds which is used among many people to calm themselves down and supposed to ease peoples nerves, so I added this quietly underneath the original audio. For the original audio I used Avid's own audio tool D-Verb, and adjusted the settings to give the audio a very faint relay and echo, slight ambient effect to make it sound like the audios coming from another room, and this really worked collectively to produce a low quality sound track for the visuals.

This is my forth and final piece of editing for my minor project and I'm very happy with how all the final edits turned out. I think its good that you can see a progression through all the clips, and that there not all just edited the same, you can see certain techniques done better and new effects that completely change the outcome of the piece. This was a good edit challenge for me to take and has elevated my editing skills and game for future productions.

Minor Project - Transformers: Age of Extinction Edit

The third clip I was to edit for my minor project was Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014). This is a very CGI heavy piece, full of special effects and action set pieces, very reliant on the visuals, and very little sound input at all. The clip is of course robots fighting each other with humans stuck in the middle. I began editing this clip by rearranging the size and making it fit for 16:9 and cropping any overflow parts of the footage. Then because this specific clip is CGI orientated and features very fantastic colours and tones, I decided to completely boost up all the colour effects I possibly could. I used colour effect and heightened a lot of the qualities to give a strong overwhelmingly bright visual experience for the audience. It gave the footage a very cheap feel and even took away from some of the action, making it look silly and cartoony. After adjusting the colours, I added a second layer to add the footage again and superimposed it over the footage of the original, and played it one frame behind, giving the slow and lacking effect again that the footage is jumping and buffering a little bit. Also on this layer I added a little ripple effect that would play throughout, making certain areas of the footage more noticeable and almost adding a lens flare of sorts to specific shots. I quite enjoyed the impact this had on the footage, and it was something new for me to add to my editing style for this piece. Over the top of all the footage I had short clips of digital interference and even some analog disruption playing off and on, really stealing the attention from the audience and becoming quite irritating. In the comparison picture below, you can see the true effect of my altered visual footage, next to the high quality original footage.

After the visuals had been altered, I moved on again and started working on the audio for this action packed sequence. Because audio has such a strong effect on the viewer and the majority of this audio was score/sound effects and explosions, I really wanted to deteriorate the audio quite effectively on this piece and really see whats more important. For the original basic sound I used Avid's very on D-Verb effect and minimised all aspects of the sound so you're really struggling to listen out for anything of importance. Under all this I played some microphone distortion which really impacted the final piece greatly. The distortion was very loud and synced up great with some of the action, It makes the piece unwatchable and a absolute waste of time watching. This effect may only find its true purpose of this clip rather than any of my other ones.

Out of all the clips, this was the one I was most interested and excited to edit and I'm very pleased with the final result of these clips. I spent more time on this clip than the previous two, and incorporated old and new techniques to really find that balance of low quality visuals and low quality audio. The response my experiment gathers from this clip will be very important in seeing which is of more importance. I'm very excited for an audience to give their opinions on all of this clips so far.

Minor Project - Goodfellas Edit

The second clip I was to edit for my minor project was Goodfellas (1990). The clip I decided to use from Goodfellas was the very iconic scene with Joe Pesci come to be known as "Funny How?" This is a very strong performance piece and gets real intense, real quick. I wanted to use this clip because it relies on its audio quality quite a lot but it is elevated when accompanied with the visuals, when you see the strong performances of everyone involved. Like the
Gravity clip, I began by editing the visuals first. Due to the film been the oldest out of my choices with been released in 1990, I wanted to give it a very home video feel to it, but also a cheap knock off style as well. I used an image of scanlines and superimposed them over the top of the footage, this added a very dated feel to it, and made it seem like it was been watched on VHS or a very old TV of sorts. After adding the scanlines I also wanted to give a very disfigured look to the visuals and cut the footage horizontally through the middle and removed the bottom half. I added the clip in again and enlarged the footage slightly and this was to be played under what had been cut, so it all played in sync and in time but the bottom half was slightly larger and quite off putting. After making these changes, the visual quality had been lowered pretty noticeably and isn't anything like it used to be, so I only wanted to make any other alterations very minimal to not go overkill on the clip. I edit the visual style of the clip by using Colour Effect again and altered the piece slightly to create a brighter tone than the original, which again makes it visuals look cheap.

Again after editing the visuals I needed to focus on switching them around and altering the audio. For this clip, I wanted to keep with the theme of making it feel old and vintage and I decided that as well as editing the audio in my own way, I was going to add TV static over the top to give a very irritating and distracting sound aspect to the piece. Because the visuals for this clip will be normal and of high quality, I wanted the audio to completely distract you from that and make you want to stop watching. I think everyone has had disruption like TV static on their sound before and know just how annoying it can be to the production as a whole. We've come to evolve with technology so static and disruption in audio is only their when we want it. I again used D-Verb to alter the sound because this piece is very dialogue heavy, and if you quieten that audio so the talking is very minimal and sounds far away, then you have your audience straining and struggling to follow the plot, making the piece unwatchable.

I'm pleased with the direction my clips are taking, this piece in particular is very good and I think achieves everything I wanted it to achieve from the get go. It's good that from the progress from the Gravity clip I was able to use some of the same techniques and effects, as well as using new ones that would not be as effective in other clips, but work just right for this piece. I'm pleased with progress my edits are making.

Minor Project - Gravity Edit

The first clip I was to edit for my minor project was Gravity (2013). I used one of the most recognisable clips from the film which is the major set piece where everything goes wrong, and you find are protagonist astronauts becoming unattached in space. I begin first with editing the visuals and altering them to a low quality standard. I started the process with a little resize and making sure everything was tight and fit in with each other.

I then started applying the colour correction and colour effect techniques I learnt from experimenting. The colours in Gravity are very strong and vibrant, in fact the film won academy awards for best visuals and best video editing which is what I'm trying to alter for low quality. Adjusting the brightness and the contrast was very helpful in making the visuals look cheap and pirated almost. The hue and saturation is also a good area to edit as it can produce drastic or limited changes to the picture. I wanted to find a balance between these two in not making it so drastic that it looks ridiculous, and not so limited that it's barley noticeable, there needs to be some kind of effect that people can notice and put them off their viewing experience. I also added a second video layer playing the same clip from Gravity but a frame later, and superimposed it over the top. This made it see through and gives it an almost stuttering effect which can be very off putting. 

I also used both digital and traditional video interference clips that were superimposed over the top, to really give a glitchy effect that makes it almost impossible to finish watching. Below you can see a side by side view of the original clip from Gravity, and the the video altered version I made for my experiment. You can see that my version is a lot more blurry and unclear, as well as the colours look a lot more cheap and weaker in my video altered version.

After working on the visuals and altering them to the low standard, I needed to do the vice versa and work on altering the audio to a low standard and keeping the normal high quality visuals. For the audio I used Avid's own audio effect tools, mainly D-Verb. D-Verb allows me to alter the sound and make it sound ambient almost. I wanted the sound to put people off and have them struggling to understand, so the audio was altered to make it sound like it was coming from another room. D-Verb offers quite a range of effects like this but I didn't want to over do it for this edit, as I hope to improve and add more in future edits and alterations. 

I'm very happy with how this edit turned out, on both fronts with the visuals and audios. I think the visuals are effective for making them seem low standard and off putting, but I definitely think I can improve the style in which I'm doing it and making it seem less obvious and seamless through experience. I'm very pleased with how the sound turned out because it sounds exactly like a cheap pirated rip off DVD with the audio almost coming from the over room. This was a good first experiment in the project. 

Minor Project - Televisions and Sound

With all this talk of high quality sound and high quality visuals, I decided to research a little into how the majority of people view and watch their content, at home on a television. Televisions are constantly changing the game with new revolutionary screen sizes and quality like 4K, but all this comes at a cost. All these changes to the display are actually affecting the quality of the sound. With making TV screens thinner and larger, the sound is becoming an after thought, when its just as important as the detail to visuals. You may not be fully aware if your television has bad audio.

"Ask yourself this: have you ever had to turn the volume way up to hear a line of dialog? Ever had miss entire sections of plot because there was so much going on on-screen that the jumbled mess was unintelligible? These are prime examples of bad audio.

The sound you hear is compressions and rarefactions in the air (the soundwaves), produced by a small moving object called a driver. To produce deep bass sounds, the driver either has to be very large, or have lots of power behind it. To produce very high sounds, the driver should ideally be fairly small. With enough processing and amplifier power, fairly small drivers can produce surprisingly decent sound. Modern TVs have none of these features."

This proves just how important sound is and my experiment will back this up. This also proves that television companies don't care about the sound their selling with their TV's as much as the visuals and their stunning "4K" quality. Now this could all be a marketing scheme to get you to buy separate speakers and spend more money, but when buying a TV you shouldn't just be buying the visual side, you should also be getting the same quality with your sound system in the TV. 

"There is no worse place to put a speaker driver than the back of a TV. Think about how someone sounds if they’re talking with their back to you. Not very clear, right? High frequency sounds are very directional. Sure, if your TV is near or mounted on the wall, some of the high frequency sounds will bounce back towards you (and in fact, this is how TVs with rear-firing speakers are designed to work). However, if the TV is out further in a room, you’re out of luck."

Maybe one day television companies will devote as much time and effort into their audio side as much as their visuals, as without quality sound, the TV could be considered worthless. 

Source:
https://hdguru.com/what-hdtv-manufacturers-dont-want-to-tell-you-about-tv-sound/

Minor Project - Footage Decisions

Originally my plan for this module was decided on genres which would most benefit from this experiment, and which ones may lean towards needing stronger visuals and than audio but recently I've had a change of heart. Due to time constraints and creative decisions, I've decided only to use my own films and student films very minimally to show how this kind of experiment doesn't perform positively on these types of footage. I've experimented with certain student footage to discover it doesn't affect the quality as significantly as I'd like, so I'm using this in my work to show I tried with this type of footage but didn't receive the results I'd like. 

Because of this I've decided it may be best to edit and alter big budget feature films that have set the high quality standard that audiences are accustomed to. Fair use is a rule/law that makes this possible for me as a student and creative editor, where I can use and edit the footage to my own purpose and be protected under fair use. The genres I've landed on using for my work is: 

• Action/Adventure
• Horror
• Drama
• Visual Spectacle 

These four genres should cover the range I'm hoping to explore but more could be added if needed. Action/Adventure should provide a heavy action set piece with a lot of visual activity with the audio necessary to follow the plot. Horror will provide an uncomfortable mood that relies on both sound and video to fulfil its purpose. Drama will be a dialogue heavy piece with an intense acting performance needing both visuals and audio. The Visual Spectacle will rely on its action packed special effects and overwhelming visual content which will put audio to the test. 

The four films that should cover these are: 

• Gravity (2013)
• The Conjuring 2 (2016)
• Goodfellas (19900
• Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014)

I've found clips in all these films which will help me complete my experiment. They match up with all the guidelines I was looking for and should help me achieve success from this module. 

Minor Project- Editing Techniques

For this minor project I have decided I will be editing on the professional software Avid. Avid is the industry standard for editing and I've learnt more and more skills since I've been at Uni. For this module I need to learn the opposite of everything I've been taught, I'll need to downgrade and disrupt the quality of the videos instead of improving them and editing for a higher standard. I've began researching techniques and ways of lowering the quality and quite a few or using the same tools I already use for improving but lowering and decreasing certain aspects to see a major effect on the visuals.

Tools such as Colour Effect play a major part in the importance of degrading the visual quality, changing the hue and saturation can have significant effects on the colours and remove or add brighter and darker tones completely changing the final outcome. You can also alter individual colours with this effect to really change and add an off putting visual look to the film. Another technique I've learnt to change the visual quality is to give the appearance of poor frame rate and sort of give it an echo. To achieve this I need to use the visual twice. On one layer will be the main footage that will be used for maintaining the story and to be edited, while the second layer will be placed above and set to play one frame after the original clip, but superimposed over the top making it see through and noticeable on the video. This is a very effective technique in lowering the video quality and is quite off putting for the audience. Along with the colour changes this is my primarily method of effecting the visual quality of the footage, other changes will be applied here and there so all videos don't look the same, but I don't want to alter it too much because theres a chance of overkill which could ruin the experiment.

For the audio quality I looked into using different software for editing the sound aspect as Avid does offer their own sound effect editing, there are other software which is for only sound editing. Adobe Audition, Audacity and iZotope are professional and industry standard softwares known for sound editing and can offer unique sound editing for my work but my main goal is to lower the sound quality instead of enhancing or improving. Lee should me new methods of using the Avid sound editing tools and very interesting ways of altering the sound to achieve the effect I want. Using Avid's own sound editing tools does not only create the sound effects I'm looking for, but it also makes it simpler with less and less going to and from softwares, exporting and importing files and clips.

Minor Project- Films with Bad Video

While researching films with bad audio, it only seemed fair to research films with bad video and weigh up each side. Surprisingly, other than films with really bad visual effects, they're aren't too many films with low quality visuals, that weren't because of the time and availability of technology during that era. Films such as The Blair Witch Project were filmed on a low budget and used the low quality visuals (and also audio) to it's advantage through a clever marketing scheme. Many 80's and 90's films have been criticised for their bad quality and foggy like cinematography but this is mainly due to the converting and restoring process at the time. Many films from earlier decades like the 60's have been remastered and tend to look better than films from the 80's and 90's because they are yet to be remastered.

Films that are probably considered to have the lowest quality of footage is the earliest form of it, such as silent films but you can't criticise this genre based on its visual look and quality. It started the whole industry off and set us on the path we're on now.

A recent release film that seems to have the attention of movie fans due to its low quality visuals in theatres is Spectre (2015)

"At this point, I noticed that the quality of the main film was nothing like as good as the preceding material.

It looked soft, unsaturated, grainy (but not in a good way) and noisy and indistinct in the shadows. At times it almost looked like a high-res version of a VHS recording!

I have no idea what was going on here. I don’t know if there was something wrong, or whether this cinema buys lower resolution copies for its secondary screens (I really do doubt that). Or maybe I’ve got so used to digital that I was noticing that most of the movie was acquired on 35mm film. I’m no expert on cinema film delivery or projection, but I am used to looking at very high quality material, and this certainly wasn’t.

It was all the more striking because I had already seen that the cinema was capable of projecting extremely high quality pictures."

Now this seems to be up for debate at the moment but there are numerous accounts of people having the same viewing experience. Most high budget films are of very high visual quality so the quality of Spectre at these cinemas must have really been low for people to have noticed and talked about it after there experience. 

Sources:

https://www.avforums.com/threads/spectre-picture-quality.1989810/

http://www.redsharknews.com/technology/item/3093-why-was-spectre-s-image-quality-so-poor-when-i-saw-it-in-the-cinema

Minor Project- Films with Bad Audio

It's not all that common that many big budget films are released with low quality audio anymore these days, but there a few that slip through the cracks. Although in some cases the quality of audio can be quite opinionated and matter to you as an individual, more than a general majority, but I've decided to research into some films that are known for their bad audio.

A common movie many people bring up when discussing bad sound is Christopher Nolan's Interstellar (2014). This wasn't just from your average movie going audience, many insiders in the industry also have problems and complaints about this one. The feedback hasn't been positive when it comes to the sound mixing of the film. Theres been many talk about misunderstanding dialogue and completely not been able to hear it, due to composer Hans Zimmer's score increasingly getting louder. This has many people wondering how it got released like this, it completely takes you out of the movie at some points and is not the standard you've come to expect from these films. Interstellar's sound mixing team includes rerecording mixers Gary Rizzo and Gregg Landaker, who are both experienced pros and worked with Nolan before on 2010's Inception, winning them an Oscar.

In 1972's The Godfather, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, there is a few sound effect issues here and there but nothing to major to really affect the film too much. Audiences have pointed out that in a seen where someones windshield gets kicked in, you can hear the sound of breaking glass before it actually happens, and again in a scene during an assassination attempt, one of the assassins gun is smoking but it made no gun shot noise. These are very minor audio mistakes, that shouldn't be happening in a film of this standard but not major enough to ruin the quality of the overall production.

Similar to the audio problems in The Godfather, 1993's Jurassic Park, directed by Steven Spielberg also has a few minor inconveniences in the audio department here and there. During lunch, when Malcolm says, 'And now you're selling, you wanna sell it,' the short quickly cuts to Gennaro. In it, Malcolm's lips are still moving after he's finished speaking. Again in the kitchen scene, the instant the first velociraptor hops up onto the counters, it knocks off a large metal pot. There is no sound of it hitting the ground. I began researching Jurassic Park because of a debate we had in lesson with our tutor Andy Conway. Conway claimed that the audio and mixing in Jurassic Park was of low quality and that Spielberg was more focused on Schindler's List at the time, and that Jurassic Park was an after thought. This sparked much debate in the class due to many of the students loving Jurassic Park and was quite amusing to hear everyones different arguments for and against the quality of Jurassic Park.