Alexa Barrett - Senior Project

Got Preliminary Approval

Worked on my roughcut this week and also tried a lot on my trailer. On Monday I worked for it for an hour but didn't save and then Final Cut froze and my computer shut down. I lost all of the work that I had done for the past hour or so. It was so frustrating but I made it up after having some lunch and trying to clear my head. Its getting really stressful. Kenny taught me how to cross dissolve and intercut shots so that I can break up the clips in the trailer with blackness like they do in professional trailers. I also learned how to write text and have it get bigger or move across the screen. This thanksgiving break my goal is to finish my rough cut and be working on refining the cuts. Mr. Kilfara gave me preliminary approval to present which means that he thinks I'm on the right track. We both know though that I have A LOT to do and once I have more free time because of college applications and finals this week (last week before break), I'll be able to get a lot more done.

Tolling away

I'm still working at my rough cut. I have finished the ending and the beginning scenes. I am working on the middle dialogue chunk. I have not heard back from Matt and Kim about using the song Daylight in my film. For one of my college applications I have to make a one minute trailer of the film, so I will begin working on that next week during Thanksgiving break. I plan on working to refine it during Thanksgiving break. Mr. Kilfara gave me a deadline for wednesday to finish the rough cut so that he can have a better idea of what type of advice he can give me and help me out if I need to take a new direction with any of the scenes or cut them, etc. Tonight, at Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor my films will be shown in the Long Island Film Festival! I won Best Student Director for my film Crimson Awakening. There will be other shorts by other students and adults that hopefully I can learn something from or get inspired by.

Rough Cut

I am up to scene 14 with my rough cut edit. It has been going well. I am a little concerned but I think every editor is when they begin actually editing their footage together. Some things that seemed like a really good idea on set are not panning out well in the editing room because they do not mix well. For example, I tried to keep most of the shots through out the beginning and middle of the film wide so that I could make a stylistic choice and have the end, most emotionally-intense portion of the film, be shot entirely in close-ups. When shooting, there was a beautiful middle-shot of Kenny that I shot most of the scene in because the way the light was hitting his face was just coming across really nicely on the screen. Now that I am in the editing room and contrasting it with an extremely wide shot of Tina, where the viewer can see the porch and bushes as well, it does not look coherent and the two shots do not complement each other. There are several situations like that that I am running into but nothing has gone wrong and there have been no major complications. Of course, time has been a major concern of mine. Balancing Sat2s and College applications, in addition to school work, it has been extremely difficult to put in much extra time on my editing outside of school. I plan on getting a lot accomplished over Thanksgiving break.

Also, I got the rights to a song for my film!! I heard a song called Perpetuum Mobile on youtube and fell in love with it because it is the perfect emotional background music. Part of my process for my senior project is getting legal rights and permission for all of the songs that I use for my film so that I can submit the film to film festivals without any complications. I contacted Joanna Stephenson about receiving these rights, and got a response within several days! I also contacted the manager for "Matt and Kim" about using their song entitled "Daylight". I got a reply from the manager saying that he would make sure they saw my email about using it in my student project, but I have not heard back from them about it yet. All very exciting!!

Rough cut

started ROUGH CUT!! at 10:45 on tuesday, October 27th 2009.

Success!

I'm almost done!! I successfully went through the footage and divided it by page. I only have scene 16 to go through before I am done and I can finally get to the part I love. Editing.

Changing strategy

I have been keeping my footage divided by which scene it is in. In the script, every time location change, it becomes a new scene (so there could be several scenes within the same conversation if it switches between interiors and exteriors). When I did the first step to organizing, just moving the footage into scenes before going through them thoroughly, it would have been too time consuming to divide them by specific scenes based on int./ext./etc. so I created groups of scenes and grouped the footage based on main breaks in the conversation (ex. "scene 12+13"- see in picture). However, because the bulk of my film is dialogue, it has been very difficult logging which dialogue is in which clip.. 

a) I started quoting in the description part of the logging

b) I had an excel sheet open where I logged the name of each clip and then put what dialogue was put in it, but I couldn't put full pages of dialogue so that was difficult

c) I've now divided the second part of the script that has the BULK of the most important dialogue. I am putting the clips into "bins" (what the folders are called on Final Cut Pro- the editing software) which are labeled according pages of the script. So, the beginning of the film is divided between what scene it is in. Once I get to the scenes where Arnold comes to Connie's house and tries to coax her out and leave with him (the bulk of the dialogue), the footage is divided by what page it is on so that when I am creating the rough cut, I can do it by referring to the script and the bins. In the future (on a future project), I will have to come up with a better strategy for this.

This is getting very hard

When I organize the footage, I first name it. 

For example, 05_02_CU_Tina walks inside

The 05 is the scene, 02 is what take it is, CU is close-up (what type of shot it is, WS, LS, MS, EST, O/S, etc.), and the last is a small description of whats happening in the clip.

The next step to the organization is labeling the clip (see example picture). I have five colors to symbolize the quality of the clip so that I can better sort through them when I am finding one to form the scene. 

Yellow- Good Take

Red- Best Take

Purple- Okay Take

Blue- Bad Take

Green- B-roll

I try to be strict/severe about labeling these shots because (and I am not just saying this at all or else I wouldn't have realized it as a problem in the first place) almost EVERY take is SO GOOD, I just want to label them ALL as good take. I've gotten good at judging from the beginning what category it should go in and not having to go back after I've found a better take. However, obviously I have not learned anything these past few weeks because now that I am on the last two scenes of the script (going through the footage) and looking through Mr. Kilfara's takes, EVERY CLIP IS LABELED RED, and thats not good because Red in my mind means, "this is the one and only clip to use because it can not be beat, don't even both looking at the other clips", usually I have one per scene. It is not helping that every take in the scene is red!! I have no idea what to do. Who knew having such an incredible actor would be a BAD thing? I'm never going to finish this process and be able to move onto my rough cut!!

Criticism

This week I have finally come to the close of organizing my footage. There are still several clips that I need to look through but this weekend I will commence with beginning my first rough cut of the script. I do not think that it will take that long to move through the script and get the very rough cut finished with. Next thursday and Friday we do not have school because of teacher & parent conferences. Over the summer, Rick, my teacher from Tisch at NYU, invited me to take his class at NYU on tuesdays and thursdays. This thursday, I am going to go into the city so that I can sit in on his class and maybe show a version of my rough cut to him afterwards so that I can get feedback. Once I have my rough cut completed, I will also show it to Bob Reeves, my outside consultant, and get some feedback from several teaching assistants that I worked with over the summer at NYU. This weekend I am going to be focused on finishing my organizing and beginning my rough cut so that I can have a rough cut of the full 20 minutes by thursday. Once I have a rough cut this film will really start to get developed.

Beginning the film

After going to the Hampton film festival last weekes and viewing many student films as well as features, I was very inspired. I am currently developing an idea about how to incorporate stop motion into the begining of my film to introduce the beginning credits. I am almost to the point ready to begin my roughcut. This morning I flew to LA, California where I am going to check out film schools or college. I just visited Chapmen and I will also be seeing UCLA and USC to compare. I am sure that by sitting in on classes and seeing the culture of film here, I will be further influenced in the style that I will edit the fiilm. I look forward to seeing my progress with the roughcut by the this coming week.

Organizing

There have been no difficulties with my project so far. Mr. Kilfara and I still need to go and film the b-roll shots of the farms in East Hampton and Wainscott. I have been organizing my footage every day. This weekend I will be going to the Hamptons Film Festival friday, saturday, and sunday, and seeing a variety of different styles of film so that I can gather technique and personal interpretation to further inspire my own piece of work. Next week I plan on beginning my rough cut which will be the most exciting part of this project for me. I am very excited!!