Assignment: Final Cut

For next week me and Clarice need to have a Final Cut of our version of Night Journey.

Due to our conflicting schedules we decided to again split up the work load whereby I came in one day and looked at putting together the picture cut and Clarice came in sorted out the sound before we then found a day again to come in and put the final touches together.

Before I could get started I finally organised our subclips by putting them into bins based on location and character i.e.: Train Station, Exterior Train, Sid Only, Man Only, Sid and Man etc. (Sid is the name we gave the protagonist as Man was already reserved for the Cannibal)

The story that I had in mind when I put together the picture cut was that the main character (The man who boards the train) in delusional. He thinks that he is seeing a man that wants to kill him, but it's all in his head, he is the man who he thinks he's seeing. This is signified by the man flashing in and out when other people rush into the room when the man pulls the alarm, and also again when the conductor comes into the carriage and the cannibal disappears, leaving the conductor to only acknowledge the man. Its almost like the man is plagued by insomnia and as he falls asleep his demons disappear.

I found pictures that I thought best portrayed this, based on facial expressions and camera movements and eye line, according to Murch's Six trying to create the most important elements; Story and Emotion by what I had to work with in the other four. I felt that the ending if nothing more helped you to relate to Sid as he looks happy and goes to sleep signifying that everything that he had seen was part of his insomniac delusions. Though the Insomnia angle may not be recognised I thought it was an important element for me to know as it helped on building the picture cut.

Once I was finished I put in where the credits would go and how long it would last just to get an idea of how long the entire sequence was and to help me when I added the soundtracks that Clarice found and I chose.

As Clarice's job was sound I didn't want to take over to much so only put in the three chosen soundtracks in the areas they worked with the picture cut and the development of the story and with that I was done with the final picture cut and started the rough sound edit.

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After Clarice had done what she could with the Sound which included fading in and out of the soundtracks I added in yesterday and putting together the story to match the picture with the audio clips, we both came in to fix up other little details and bounce suggestions off each other. We keep the script in the background to help us navigate the audio subclips we made of the narration which is sorted per scene, making finding the right words, phrases and sentences a lot quicker..

I cut a segment of the static noise that was in the background of every dialogue, because where we used the dialogue was really spaced out and there was an obvious start and stop (Last audio track)

We then went about finding sounds to fit with the exterior shots of the train, and when it was taking off from the station, fiddling about with the audio levels and the placement of the sound track as some were cut to short or fit perfectly at some points and not at all at others. By using fades in and out this helped to cover that and also created a good effect for when the train went in and out of shot.

After all the sounds were fixed we added all the appropriate titles and listened to it both in and out of headphones. And exported it. Because the footage was 4:3 we weren't sure if we should export it in that format or just export it in 16:9 which was what we always exported it in. As it was only the presentation coming up we just exported it in 16:9 and would change it for the assessment hand in.