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.