How Editing Went

    Over this whole week I've been working hard on editing my short film with the goal of finishing it this weekend. I'm pleased to say I've done just that! I had originally mentioned that I had issues with the length of my short film, but after adding some clips and getting the footage I forgot to get of the empty room, I made the short film get to 4 minutes and 55 seconds. Like I mentioned in my previous post, I had planned on editing on Adobe Premiere Pro, but unfortunately neither of my computers were able to support such a heavy program, so I ended up using CapCut after talking to my friends in the class, who mentioned they also had to resort to the same thing. This worked out really well, as it allowed me to work on the project during my spare time at school and when I was out of the house. 

    I split the the days up by priority, first focusing on the look and coloration of the short film and then focusing on sound. For coloring I made it so each color character was incredibly saturated, while Death was very undersaturated, but would slowly gain saturation and they also gained another colored aspect from the other characters. I messed around with a grainy filter here and there, and realized I didn't really like the look, so I kept the filter very minimal.

    As for the sound, this took the longest (almost two whole days). For the ending, I already knew what I wanted which was something very peaceful, yet intense. It wasn't hard to pick copyright free ambient music off of YouTube (where I got all of my sound effects). 

 

For Yellow's section, I decided a heartbeat in the background would be most fitting since they are always so worried about their physical "symptoms" and what they could mean, and as they began to panic more, the heartbeat gets faster. For Purple, since the character itself doesn't care about death, I figured I'd keep it simple and just add some outdoors noises to the background, since I had to remove them from the original clip since it was way too loud and drowning out Graesen's voice. 

    Green's section was by far the hardest as nothing seemed to fit right with the scene. I tried everything, from sad music, to no background at all, but nothing fit. I knew I needed audio in the background because it felt too empty, so I turned to my friend Grace who had taken this class last year for advice. I showed her, and couple of the people who were in the project what I had and asked what they thought. They liked it, but also didn't really know what to put for the background. Grace agreed that something was missing from Green's section. That's when my sister Mariana, who plays Green, suggested something like traffic noises. And so that's what I did. I made the background noise for Green's section be an auditory representation of Green reliving the car crash and moments after, with the sound of the car crashing and an ambulance in the distance. 

After sending the first draft to Ace and Gaby for some feedback, and making some final adjustments, like adding a zoom out animation to the end credits to make the empty room a little more visually interesting, it's safe to say I'm finally done! Overall, I loved how the film turned out and I am so proud of myself for what I've created. Getting this short film edited has been my main priority this past week, and I'm pretty sure my friends and family are ready to stop hearing me talk about it all the time. Still, I'm so excited to show everyone what I've created!