Development: Editing the clips and it's proccess

Here is a post about the editing stages and the process the final clips have went through for the show reel and presentation. Mark has been using Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects and syncing it up with the audio I've created for each scene. I've also included some foley sound to suite for each one for Mark to work with as well such as background noise for indoors/outdoors as well as some sounds of the puppets actions.

Mark imported the video files through Final Cut in order to trim and name them, then created a new project in Adobe Premiere Pro where they could be edited on the more powerful Uni. computers. For each video he trimmed trimmed them down to remove the "action" and "cut" points and leave only the performed footage.  To synchronise the audio tracks to the video he expanded the audio clips in the timeline to see the waveforms of the words and matched the first peak to the first movement of the puppet's mouth.  Because during a few of the performance some of the mouth movements did not exactly match the on set audio it was necessary to cut the audio track at points and match the waveforms to movements at intervals to achieve the best lip sync.

With the sound synced Mark colour corrected the videos with the Fast Colour Corrector to make "skin tone" consistent.  The colour was then graded to bring increase the sense of depth in the frame using Brightness and Contrast.  When there was a need to change elements of the scene Mark duplicated the video layer and used garbage masks to isolate areas of it which could then be altered independently of the main scene.  This allowed changes to background action (Tennis ball landing), removal of camera reflections from a window and reduction of highlights from cinema seating that would have revealed on set lighting.  

Adobe After Effects was used to process the green screen footage.  The "Keylight 1.2" filter was used to create the matte.  A photo was put below that video layer to serve as a background with a noise filter added to make it match the grain of the original video.  The finished videos were put into a timeline together in Premier Pro and any inconstancy in sound and video were adjusted with the previously mentioned editing methods.  Title and credits were added and the videos were exported for viewing.

The idea is to mash up all the clips together to create jump cuts between each one which has set the mood to being low when certain clips are more serious and then uplifting again for related clips with more upbeat tones of the conversations and how the puppets behave. We have found the flow to effect the viewers mood in this way after reviewing the order ourselves with also discussion together.
It jumps much in the way that creature comforts does with the same theme in mind but with various scenes and situations that compliment each other and keep the viewer's interest.

The idea was also to make the puppets look as if they did not notice the viewer and that it was us looking in on little snippets of their personal lives and their discussions about mental illness. Which got the more positive response in tutorials and others viewing them with us. We did also try other types of camera angels that were more direct and even including ourselves but they just didn't seem to fit as well as the non direct ones.
The only direct interaction with the viewer is the introduction and outro with Gair's puppet for the purpose of invitation to the viewer and allowing them to settle into anticipation of puppets to be presented to them.

This has worked out for the purpose of assessment show reel when we also have the intention of uploading all the clips to YouTube which would allow it to be in a much more random order but the clips to still work with jump cutting.

Here is some screen shots of the process of colour grading the scenes to tidy them up a little better.

Mark also used his television while at home to help with the work flow and also to see how it differed from being on a computer to a television screen as color and quality would be different.

Here is some screen shots of the final clips.

Here's also an example of one being finished on it's own to just show the finished result of it being through editing but also to see how it stands on it's own as a single clip.



It's all coming together nicely just a case of rendering and putting it on to dvd and getting the other bits ready for presentation at assessment.