In my initial reflections I want to mention the importance of time management. I put a lot of effort into the initial planning. I wrote the entire script, which took more time than I expected. To produce a coherent narrative, I analysed other schizophrenia focused movies (e.g. A beautiful mind) and borrowed some of the conventions. Initially, I thought that having a rough draw out of sick figures would work for the storyboarding. But after trying to make sense of my storyboarding on set, I understood that the rough drawing ignored a lot of external factors such as natural light, back ground and other factors. A better storyboard would've created, better footage to edit, which would have made my editing process easier.
I underestimated the amount of time required to finish the filming. Although we didn't have a lot of filming sessions, each filming session was around 6 to 7 hours long. I completely forgot that I had marginal control over the set because we had two crewmembers myself and Myryl. Which means we didn't have tracking lights we could only set them up in one position. Which caused us to create a lot of static shots. For the theatre scene, I was very worried that the underexposure of lights, will create too much noise, and I was right. So we had to reshoot that scene. Which was again very time consuming.
When creating the rough edit, I have spent too much time on small details, such as distortion and glitch effects, and didn’t do much editing soon the overall opening. I was constantly trying to save the bad footage by adding more effects to it, I was too stubborn and tried convince myself that filters, colour grading and effects could save the footage.
After the final rough cut viewing, I understood that we needed to reshoot the footage.
After the rough cut viewing, I analysed together with Myryl what has to be reshot. There were two particular scenes, first one was the theatre scene, and the conversation scene.
Because I didn't know how to edit before studying media studies. It was a huge challenge for me to learn how to use Final Cut Pro, after effects and Davinci resolve. I have spent a significant amount of time on watching tutorial videos, trying to understand the basic mechanics of these software's and editing my footage. Failing to create the effect at first was destined, none of the editing effects that I used were created using first try. That was also one of my major underestimations of how time-consuming it will be to learn how to edit.
While editing this scene, I encountered a problem. When masking out the pupil from the black eye the second mask, X and Y axis were altered, by Final Cut Pro. and I couldn't understand why the position of the mask changed. I overcame this problem by looking up the instruction manual, and in the shortcut key bind section. I figured out that I when editing the footage I press the ‘set key frame’ shortcut key, and scrolled the wheel of my mouse, which caused alterations in the X and Y axis. After figuring out, what I did wrong I removed the key frames and the position of the second mask reverted to its original position.
I used a Olympus OM1. that gave us an advantage as most of the settings are automatic. For scenes where Myryl was going down the stairs, we tried using handheld shots and a Benro tripod, to stabilise the shot.
When editing the scene, I thought there must be a more powerful line from Elise. So I recorded my voice and used logic pro X, and use autotune to tune down the picture of the audio, which allowed to create, an oppressive and powerful scene.
Finding time to film was challenging for us because I had to prepare for his GCSE Maths and As Biology exams, and we both had after-school activities on different days which meant the days Myryl was free, I wasn't. We initially planned to film during the Chinese New Year break, but unfortunately due to Covid, the school shut, and then students were not allowed to be on the school premises. Because all of your scene were in school that was a big problem. So for our group, the strategy we did was whenever we had free time we would shoot a bit so we can somehow accomplish all the scenes little by little. To be honest, the two of us were kinda worried because 3 groups in our class already finished and we still had not, but then we would always talk about it in class when Mr. Wunker give us a few minutes to be in our groups.
When we were planning, the two of us were honest about when we didn't completely accept with the ideas each of us had. However, we found middle ground, between our perspectives, I wasn’t very pleased because I wrote the entire script and Myryl didn’t like it. We discovered while filming that even with a plan in place, things don't always go as expected. For instance, there were times when the gimbal we were using was flimsy, preventing us from getting the shots we wanted and forcing us to reshoot. There were also times when the lighting was poor, forcing us to constantly reposition the artificial lighting.
Of course I need to continue editing the footage, and add sound to our video. I’m not really satisfied with the colour grading, so I might need to alter that as well.
We need to meet up and get extra footage for the theatre scene, and if we had time we should also redo the conversation scene. The actor for Diana, won’t available as she has As level exams, so I will probably need to stick to the footage and continue editing it.
Comments