Been editing (edit assisting anyway) over the course of the last few weeks, working with the footage we've got back from the Bones of Essimer shoot.
Suppose the trickiest part of it has been editing with the greenscreen footage. I haven't worked with greenscreen footage before so editing with it was strange. Hard to really see if what you're cutting is any good with a bright green background jumping out at you, it's really quite distracting and it colours (no pun intended) how you perceive the performances. But hopefully once all the vfx elements are in place it will come together. And sound as well - that's another big thing, difficult to tell how the end product will look because sound and music play an important part in how the cinematic is interpreted. But we've done what we think is right at this stage and now we have plenty of work on the vfx side of things to get us ready for the premiere and for Armageddon Auckland on Oct 24th.
We've had feedback from a few people on the edit, and they've given some useful advice, but I think we may need more outsider opinions to gauge how an audience who has no knowledge of Essimer would respond. Because we've been "living" in the Essimer world for so long, it's easy to fall into the trap of assuming the audience knows as much as us about the story, when obviously they don't.
Still have to organise pick-up shoots as well, then onto the task of packing things down, returning props, costumes etc.
Will post some screengrabs soon.
Any comments to make on structuring the trailer?
ReplyDeleteSure thing. We've basically shot for two structures - one is more of a linear cinematic introduction sequence, whereas the other one is more of a mashup of cutscenes that would be interspersed in a video game (e.g. the live action cut sequences that bridged the gameplay in 'Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Force 2' - old game but just one that I can remember at the moment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oR3mTfnCh8Q )
ReplyDeleteSo I think challenge will be how we stitch these two structures together (if we decide to do that. We may leave them seperate and use the the cutscenes some other way e.g. we could use those for the promo material for Armageddon, or we may use them on the website. We could even add them into the BTS if we really wanted to, just to add something a bit different to it). There are a few options there, but we can start making more of those decisions once vfx and sound are further ahead.
With the edit itself, in some scenes there were a few options on how it could be edited, and each way provided something unique. For example, for the branding scene we discussed whether to open with the woodchopping shot or whether to fade in with the dolly shot, and then how long we should hold the dolly shot before cutting away. Each way of editing provided a different feeling to the scene and gave us different options on how/when to draw out tension and how/when to release it.
It's always good to have those kinds of creative options though.
Ultimately, the final call on the edit is the director's/editor's, but I think it has been good having an editor and edit assist working together because it opened up more options and made us think about the justification for each scene and each shot. It wasn't so much "this is a bad edit, and this is a good edit", it was more "here are few different edits - but what do we want from this scene, and what is going to fit best with the rest of the story?".
In some scenes we had to think more about the flow of information. For example, in the fight scene we had to balance a lot of parallel action between several characters in a way that 1. wasn't going to be too confusing for the audience and 2. still kept the pace needed to convey the sudden turn of events.
I found it tricky to judge in this case without the background vfx plates, the music or the sound because a lot of the time that's what can really help to bridge those scenes - where there is a lot of information to convey in a short timeframe, music and sound can do some of that work for you.