March 10, 2016
Slowly and steady wins the race… I hope. That’s how editing has been going over the past week. Each day I would complete a new visual effect to the film and make a few edits here and there. They are sequences edits mostly. Adding shots so they follow with a script or cut down the time for some of the less important scenes. I was able to shave about 30 seconds from the film. It’s now at about 15 minutes and 30 seconds long. I expect that number to grow drastically once we add the missing scenes. I originally said the maximum length I wanted the film to be was 15 minutes. I did it to give range in length, I never suspected I would go over it. I’m not sure whether I should dock points for myself for it, or congratulate myself for doing something more difficult...
Speaking of difficult, I’m about halfway done with the film’s visual effects… of things we’ve already shot. I may only be about ¼ of the way through for the entire film.
My strategy mostly involves completing effects that are “new” first and do the “repeat” effects later. For example, the film has a lot of effects where Monty is moving at super speed. Once I’ve established what the speeding looks like (which I have) the rest of the super speed effects are rinse and repeat. Since it will take less time, it makes more sense to move on to the effects I have not created a look for. Take the “Monty dazed” sequence for example. Storm clouds obstruct his vision and I have no idea what that looks like (I’m going to find out soon.)
Creating visual effects can be pretty tedious. A lot of the shots require rotoscoping first, or painting things in our out of the frame. It’s simple enough with After Effects’ rotobrush tool, but it takes a long time to do and is varying degrees of frustrating depending on the shot. Also, visual effects tend to look their best when you’ve layered several assets to them. It takes a decent amount of experimenting to get the look you imagined. I’ve decided to simplify the VFX since I’m on a time crunch. I don’t the the final outcome will look too low quality, but they may not be as grand as I had hoped.
Now here comes the bad news: In the realm of gathering our missing footage, Jack and I haven’t made any progress with Carter and Patrick. They were busy this week and weekend. Honestly, I think it’s going to be very difficult to start up filming again. We’ve lost too much momentum over the past couple of weeks. We were supposed to finish a month ago, instead we are almost at double the original amount of filming days and we are cutting into precious post production time.
At moments like these, I go back to the filming days at school. We lost an hour both times because people were busy that day. I think to myself, if only we hadn’t lost that time, we’d only have to worry about the street scenes and reshooting some lab scenes. We’d be in a much better (less stressful) position.
<SIGH>. So it goes.
To add fuel to the fire of misfortune, I think our dreams of having a trailer in the school-wide media festival are crushed. The deadline is next Tuesday (March 15th) and I don’t think Jack has worked on it (I haven’t gotten any updates from him). If we were keeping with the schedule, I should be color grading and putting the finished touches on it this weekend.
Sometimes, no, a lot of the time, it’s difficult being the only one who knows how to do the post production stuff. (I mean, not on a professional scale of course, but of my general age group.) It would be incredible how much time I would save if Jack knew After Effects and had the plugins I did. I could just send him some footage that I need VFX on and he could relay them back when he was done. Splitting up the work would make the process much faster. The same would go for color correction and grading. If only…
I guess one thing I could do though is send him looking for and recording some sound effects. I know I need some from his alarm and some from a computer game. I’m going to need a head start on the sound design for the movie, and gathering sounds is a job I think Jack can do well.
Wish me luck. I’m going to need it if Liquid Lightning is going to premiere in five weeks.