And so the last post and reflection starts being written while thinking and reflecting on everything that has happened not only in this year and in this particular unit, but the entire learning curve that all these years have given me and where I am today compared to where I was 3 years ago. In this post I want to talk to you directly, the reader, for you to have an insight of what I have become as a person and the outcome of this learning process, impacting in my life everyday more and more. 

 

For those who don't know, I started doing videos back in 2007. I remember my first ever video was called "The Kidnap" and it was about a girl that comes out of her flat and gets kidnapped by some random people, ends up in a 'Jungle' that was actually just some bushes on the back of the building where I used to live and she escapes. Sounds simple and not elaborated at all and it wasn't really. I remember I shot that on those little DV Videocameras that your parents used to have to record videos during holidays since smartphones weren't a thing back then. After the 'success' of the Kidnap among my classmates back at school in 6th grade, I decided to do some simple videos of me messing around at home and just recording people and doing something with that, I even remember I entered a contest from Doritos to make a commercial for them, but of course I didn't win. One of the things that makes me laugh the most is how passionate and dedicated about it I was, knowing that a video made on the spot with no script crew or anything, with 2 friends that happened to be staying overnight at my place, would even have a chance against professionals for a commercial for Doritos. At this point it was when I realised that I actually loved doing videos just for fun really and not even thinking of what others thought about it but making sure I was having fun by making them. About a year or two after, "The Kidnap 2" became a real thing and was filmed with more people, different locations and a more detailed story. This was actually the story of how the kidnapper from the first movie escapes from prison, which happened to be a park, and he how two new police detectives (from which I was one of them) were in the hunt from him, but in the end he escapes (spoilers). And just like this, many other small videos were being produced, directed, filmed, edited by me and although I knew the quality wasn't great, I still enjoyed them a lot. Imagine that all I used was a small videocamera, no tripod, no sound equipment, nothing apart from the small camera. After years of doing that, me and a friend started writing our first story together for a film called "An Attack in Suit." It was actually a very nice piece that we ended up filming for a project in school not only in Spanish but in French as well, so that was my very first time I actually translated an entire 20 min video from Spanish to French and then had 5 hours of dubbing sessions with all the actors. That was stressful, but fun. The success of our film was so great compared to all the other ones from other groups, that it was shown in school for a couple years, even though it was awful haha, but I no one really knew how to do anything better so I was really the only one in the whole school with a bit of talent for that. After that, me and the same friend decided that we were going to write and film our final piece before our final year of school, and yes, it was the so awaited conclusion of "The Kidnap 3." I realised at this stage that 4 years had passed since the production of the first one and although my equipment wasn't much better, I had learned some things about pre-producing a video and working on a story. The idea was to use a lot of people from school and nice locations as well, but sadly for one reason or another, it was the "masterpiece that never got published." After doing so many videos at school, including school projects, President of the school council campaign, videos requested by the school headmaster to myself directly and some others from friends, I felt that this is what I wanted to do and I wanted to Learn more about it. At this point I remember I finally changed from iMovie to Final Cut 7 which was a massive transition, but very important one, although sadly the moment didn't last long as I found out that my old black MacBook didn't take the pressure and crashed. At this stage I took the decision with the help of my dad to buy my first iMac, but that didn't happen until I moved to the USA back in 2011. This was very likely a huge step not only in my life as a person but in the world of media as well as I wanted to learn more about this world and I realised the school to which I went for my final year was perfect for it, because not only had a TV Pro and Advance TV Pro course, but it also had a live news produced every single day at school, which was actually broadcasted on every TV and hallway in school for people to watch after their first class. Although I didn't get the chance to do this until my second semester as I was required to take TV Pro first and this was a unit on Advance TV Pro, I enjoyed the entire school year by working on videos with better equipment and having such a great teacher as Miss Zimmerman was, who taught me all the basics about TV and I owe her the majority of knowledge I have obtained in general in this business. I believe that for any topic you need to learn the basics first in order to progress on it and man she did a great job teaching me those basics and a bit more. I had a great experienced rotating rolls on the news channel as director, producer, sound operator, camera, floor manager, B-Rool operator, Graphics, Visual Mixer and TelePrompTer operator. We used to do them alongside the Advance Journalism class who were the ones that did every morning the research on daily knees and had about an hour to writte a story about it and get it ready to then be the news anchors an hour after. All this work and the having Miss Z as a coach, took me into winning second place at a competition called Skills USA, which was come thing quite big back in the country. It was my great success and a lot of worked had payed off and I was very happy about it and I think at this stage is when I decided I wanted to study this further and try and make a career out of it. I even was camera assistant and Visual Mixer for the Minor Leagues of Baseball, which I only did once, but it was an amazing experience. Not long I found myself graduated from school and accepted in what seemed to be like my new home for the next years, which was the Broadcast Media course for UCA. 

 

The reason I wanted to share with you a brief insight of my story before university and on how I ended up being in a classroom at the Maidstone Studios back in 2013, is because I want to compare it to what I became now and the amount of stuff I have learned since that day. At first I wasn't sure how things were going to be, my dad was the one that didn't understand as much at the beginning how a TV course was at university, since it's more about arts that the usual science or social courses, like engineering, medicine, journalism, lawyer or any other. My dad didn't understand what was required from me as a person and so we both started to understand that in this are it is more important what you can do with your skills and knowledge rather than what a paper might say about you. You could be in a typical course with tests and quizzes and all that to see how much you have learned, but in this business it is not about reading loads of books and learning loads of terms, but more about what you can do in the area that you believe you are best, which in my case is editing. From my very first year I started to put as much effort as possible into my productions, mainly to be able to try to make the most out of them. The main goal I had from the beginning no matter what the outcome was, was to expand my knowledge and try new things I every video, because how can you be called a good cooker if you can only cook one dish? For my storytelling unit I decided to do a trailer a bit Hollywood style and include some green screen for the opening of it and also do it in black and white. I also remember I made my first poster for it. This was a very fun one to edit and make since it was my first video filmed with nice professional kit. For my directors unit I decided to record all the footage in 50FPS like The Hobbit, just to see the difference between 50FPS and the standard 25FPS. The outcome was nice but not relevant, but at least I can say now that I have done a video fully in 50FPS and can tell the difference. Finally for my documentary unit we were meant to create a video with the theme of someone being some sort of hero and in my case with my new team called Tekkers TV, we did something different than everyone else and instead of making a person a hero, we did a documentary on dogs being heroes and that is how Hero Hounds came to life. Before I could blink the end if the first year was upon me and I found myself right there in front of my second year. New experience and better version of myself was getting ready to affront my first and mos enjoyable unit so far, which was the Digital News. For this I also decided to step things forward and I decided to create my first and own virtual studio. This was actually great fun and hard work to make, but I believe it worked out really nicely. The colours, the theme and the video itself I believe it is one of my best videos so far. For my second unit I did something that reminded me to what used to do back in school for the newsbreak every morning, which was a studio live production. For this unit I became one of the 2 directors for the show and I had to direct a live show of half hour from a real gallery in a real studio. This was a great experience because I compared it to the gallery I used to work with back at school and although the the one at school wasn't bad, this one was bigger and felt very nice and proffessional. This was a great experience in general and I believe that this marked a step on my career as I directed instead of editing, which made me experience some very unique and different moment. After all this I found myself working on my commissions unit for which I did a video for the Orchestre de Picardie, about their projects and their future. This was actually really fun as I had worked with them during my first year, so I knew the people, I had seen what they can do and this was a better version of myself ready for making a better video. Another year was gone and my third and final year just around the corner waiting for me. 

 

With new bigger challenges, my third year was actually the big test of putting all my current knowledge and a lot of new one in action to fully produced a pilot episode for a series. For the first time ever, I actually had two focus on two areas and two areas only just like in the real world for the creation of a video, which was a really hard task as I used to like getting involved in other areas, but at the same time it helped me a lot into growing as a cinematographer and an editor. I have always been known for being a very technical person because that is what I love doing, which has been the reason why I do camera work and editing as well. I had a lot of work to do because I had two jobs, which required two different types of research and also a lot more work, but at the same time it was a lot of more learning and new knowledge which I have obtained and I am very happy about. I think that at this take the about of work that was put into Sunday League was huge and it was a long journey with a lot of ups and downs, but the most important part about it is that it was a learning curve all the way from the beginning. My dad was the first one to taught me that a smart person transforms a bad experience into a learning outcome, because a lot of time you don't learn something by reading, but from actually living it and experiencing it, so sometimes you have to go through bad moments to get a big learning outcome out of it. One of the most important things about this project is that it required a lot of teamwork and trust. Starting with things like not being part of the casting of the actors or deciding on locations, but at the same time the other members of the crew were trusting me as well into making things happen like having nice shots, editing properly and doing my job the way I was supposed to. In order for that to happen I had to do quite a lot of research and I also had to fail a couple times attempting some camera movements or some techniques while editing, but I believe that I have learned a lot about things like triple checking your shots are on focus, how to work during sunny days or on a really tight schedule. One of the things I am not that great at in general is written work. I used to be really good at it back at home in general due to debating for more than 4 years, but when it came down to writing stuff in English, I struggled a lot. I have been speaking English since I was 4, but it is very different talking and learning it than actually writing it all the time and speaking it all the time as well, specially when you have to be very formal and bring debate into a paper based on research. A lot of times I have some good ideas in my head but when I get down to writing them I am just not able to, for some reason I struggle a lot with that and I hope in the future this gets better and doesn't become a big issue. 

 

Right now I have no idea what is going to happen with me and my future. I don't know if I want to pursue this as a career or leave it as a hobby, because the thing I always used to enjoy the most was doing it as a hobby in order to be able to enjoy the fun of it. Right now all I know is I am getting married soon and I can sit and think what I want to do with my life, whether it is pursuing a career in the media industry or doing something else like hotel management, which is one of my other passions. Overall I can say that I have learned a lot and cannot believe that it has been three years already and also the end of it, I never thought the day would finally come where I could finally say I am done and I graduate from university. This is a major step in life and I am happy that I took it, because from all the good and bad experiences, I learned a lot and I will not take anything back. 

 

Hope you were able to read a bit more about myself and how the media business has changed me and how grew up to be the person I am today. If you sat and read all this I do appreciate it a lot as you took your time to know a bit more about myself. 

 

Thanks for everything,

 

Chris 

 

 

 

During early stages of the production of Sunday League, we had a couple discussions regarding the title sequence for the show and I was very keen on having something filmed instead of all graphics, but that still made a great impact and became a bit catchy. At this point we all put some ideas in, but one of the ones that Danny Hewitt, the director, showed me, was the opening titles from Parks and Recreation, from which I talk about in a previous post of my pre-production stage. The concept behind it was to create a "windows" system in which you appreciate different images at the same time showing different areas of a persons life, this is an example of the concept I based on for the creation of this "windows" system for Sunday League:

After playing around with many different effects I came out with the final piece for the opening sequence which ended up being like this:

You can see more in depth the process of getting to this point in these posts:

http://waterflu.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/pre-production-research-into-titles.html

http://waterflu.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/pre-production-research-into-title.html

http://waterflu.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/pre-production-researching-into-title.html

The creation of the title sequence let me into bringing this "windows" idea into a theme for the transitions on Sunday League. I started struggling first with transitions and how to get from one place to the other and then I realized that what I could do what actually to add another "windows" system to move from one scene to the other, making this theme very clear throughout the entire episode. Originally the title sequence goes right at the end with a scheme in which all four character are shown wishing 4 different windows or squares. I wanted to keep it like that, but I realized that the position of them was not the appropriate one for the transitions as the screen is just divided into four big squares:

My main idea behind this was to create something in Sunday League similar to what George Lucas did for the Star Wars saga, which was to include very standard transitions like Wipe, Dissolve, Clock, the Chevron, Circle and many others. This are very commonly known among amateurs since they are the ones that are usually installed as presets on very basic and simple editing softwares. The idea here is that those transitions actually fitted with the theme and didn't look unprofessional or amateur, they actually gave life and became a theme for Star Wars. Here is an example from Episode IV A New Hope:

After getting that in mind, I wanted to achieve that with a transition for Sunday League and that is when I came out with making it as squares where the new scene starts appearing in these squares as the previous one disappears. In order to understand a bit more of what I did I have just added some images of how the process works:

First we have an image from the scene we are coming out of:

Second we have the first window coming up on the left with footage from the scene we are going into:

Third we have the second window appearing:

Fourth we have the third window appearing:

Fifth we have the fourth and last window appearing:

And sixth we see how the image expanded and loses those black lines that divide the image:

As one of the extra things I wanted to create for this project, was to create a version of the first episode in english with Spanish subtitles. First of all, it is something that I have been wanting to do do for a while now, just for fun and for the experience, but now I actually have a big reason for it, which is for my mom to be able to watch the show and understand it since she doesn't really speak much english. Although it is something that I will be doing, I don't think it will be done by the end of this week since there still other more important pieces of work to do, but I will be posting it here on my blog as soon as it is done if anyone is interested in watching it. Of course the main part that I had to do, was the research of how to create them and the procedure step by step in order to do this efficiently.

The process can be complicated if you don't know how to do it, which is why in previous occasions I haven't done that well when making it happen. The first thing you have to do is:

- Create a document using Notepad, Word, Textedit or any other, and place a number 1 on top. 

- After setting up the number one, for you number subtitle input, you must put the time wishing the movie in which that piece of dialogue is said, for example:

1 

00:00:20,000 --> 00:00:24,400 

Howdy!

The format follows: hours:minutes:seconds:milliseconds

If you start repeating the process, you will end up getting a similar document like this one:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/subtitles-text-editor-aegisub/

Now, there is a couple different ways of placing the subtitles into your project. The most common one among amateurs, which is also used when making a DVD or Blu-Ray, is to actually embed the subtitles into the project itself, making them part of it, so you would have a video where the subtitles will be there no matter what. This is actually very usual and normal, but it requires time, as you have to place the subtitles within the right time frame and at the exact position every time throughout the whole movie. If you don't have a software that can do this easier for you, it could become a hard and tireless task. If you have a 5 minute video, there should be not much of a problem, but if you are talking about a 60 min feature film, then you will be there for a while.

The other option which is much easier and is used a lot in the internet when sharing and downloading videos, is to create the subtitles as a file and then just add it to the film when watching on players like VLC for example. With the exact format like the image above, all you have to do is create a file with the extension .srt which is a standard for subtitles and any player that supports subtitles, will automatically read it as you would put in the file the times in which each subtitle should be played. This is way more easier and less time consuming, but the bad side of it is that the subtitles are not placed in the film, so it can become harder to share or upload to any online player.

In case this is still confusing I will be leaving here a video I found which is very useful on how to do this:

Time lapses and B-rolls became a very important element on Sunday League, because they helped to filled in the gaps between a lot of scenes. The biggest problem I had early in the edit, was that there was too much jumping around in the script, going from one place to another and having characters in one place, next scene in another and next one suddenly somewhere else. Of course if it was different characters it could make sense, but the exact same character and giving no sign of moving places or anything, could become very jumpy and heavy for the viewer. I started consulting this with Tim the editor at first, because that was my biggest struggle, cutting those scenes and giving them sense because they can make sense in a script or a book, but on screen it is very different. Tim told me that the most ideal way of cutting this was through adding some B-rolls in between in order to not only give the audience a breath, but also to establish that something has happened in between those scenes, meaning is later in the day or the characters have moved. I was very familiar with the term B-roll which I used a lot in school in my TV Pro class, where we had to go out and get some establishing footage of whatever the news piece was going to be about for our daily news break. Another option as well which counts as a B-roll, is having time lapses that would simply imply that whatever is about to be shown, is happening later in the day or the next day for example.

The first thing that I did as part of my research was to make sure I understood the concept of a B-roll in order to apply it and film it properly. According to Brandy Barker, who used to work on Facebook and called "tech expert," the definition of a B-roll is:

"The modern day use of broll (or b-roll) is with broadcast TV as supplemental footage inserted as a cutaway to help tell the story. B-roll includes the shots that are shown to introduce a segment and/or in between the live or taped interviews. B-roll does not include sound so that custom voice-over or music can be inserted by the TV producers. Today, it is often shot in high-definition to be compatible with network TV."

https://www.quora.com/What-is-b-roll-and-how-and-why-is-it-used

As you can see on the image above, the b-roll would be that Shot 1 in which it is being established where we are. If that shot lists was to be from a TV show in which there was no dialogue, then all 6 shots would be b-roll and it would be actually called a "B-roll package,"  because you are putting together a lot of clips and trying to not only establish where we are but to tell a story or send a message, using b-rolls. This scenario is very similar to the nightclub scene that we have in Sunday League, which is all music, no dialogue and is mainly to establish not only where we are, but what has been happening by using just visuals. The idea behind the b-roll is to actually keep it for any future productions. If you go out and shoot some clouds, traffic lights, animals, people or anything that could simply help the editor fill in those gaps efficiently, there is no need to get rid of it or just store it and never use it, because usually this are shots that are nor linked directly with any type of production in specific, it is more like bank of b-roll in which a production company can access and use them in any production they want because they own it and it also saves time doing stuff over and over again.

For the Sunday League pilot, I decided to include a couple of this where I felt the edit was too quick or messy by jumping around places or where the audience could get easily lost in time. There are four main B-rolls excluding the time lapses and the nightclub package, in which I felt it was very necessary to have something in between scenes. The first one is after Tom and Dean speak on the phone and Dean says that he has to go see Nath. I thought the ideal b-roll for this was to use some way of transport, in this case train as Dean doesn't drive, plus having and outside shot of the building where he lives:

 

The second one was right after the scene in which Dean sees Nathan, he says he'll make some calls to try and get a coach and get some players. Right after that, suddenly all the four main characters are in a car parked up outside of the hall where Don is meant to be. I shot a couple of shots to establish that we have left Nath's flat and we are moving through the streets in town, going somewhere:

The third one is very similar than the second one, which is meant to happen right after the scene in which the four characters are in the car. Dean and Ollie leave the car as they go to the hall where Don is and Nath and Tom carry on and actually go to a boxing place where Tom is going to teach Nath some boxing lessons to defend himself. For this what I did was to do a b-roll from inside the car moving through the streets and parking somewhere implying that we have moved and stopped at a new place:

 The last main b-roll was one right before Dean and Ollie enter the hall where they realize that there is a wedding celebration going on in there, which made me take some shots of the food, the bride and people just talking in the wedding, to establish right before they enter, that this is a wedding reception:

The other thing I had a look after was into making time lapses with a Go Pro in order to get some nice sense of time passing throughout the film. The idea was to use it at least twice in the film, one being after the team splits up at the beginning the episode, in order to show that this is another week, another day and imply that after that bad moment, this is a bright new day. The second idea was to use it right after the post nightclub scene where Lucy and Dean almost kiss and get interrupted (oops spoilers). For this second one I actually had one that I used in a previous production back in school, which I stored and actually found in a hard drive and thought it fitted perfectly for what I needed, which was a time lapse from night to day, establishing that it is the next day. One of the main things I did first was to research into how to shoot a time lapse with a Go Pro and what the ideal settings where. I found a couple tips that were useful and used them as my guide for setting up the shots:

- Choose the right shooting interval 0.5, 1, 2, 5, 10 30, and 60 second intervals

My choice for this was 5. I originally thought about 10, but then I looked into this as a guide:

0.5 – Driving, up-close shots of something small (birds, insects, fish tank, etc)

1.0 – People walking in a busy area, heavy traffic flowing, view from a moving bus or train

2.0 – Clouds moving quickly, popular tourist areas

5.0 – Sunset or sunrise, normal moving clouds

10 – Slow moving clouds, construction sites

30 – Nature shots, Shadows moving across the ground, puddles drying, storms

60 – Plants growing, shoot the entire day or night, long-term processes

After that what I did was to:

- Pick the most ideal resolution (12MP)

Having 12MP as my resolution I had to:

- Choose the right playback rate

For me it was 25FPS mainly because that is the settings of the project I am working on and I didn't want to be messing around with there frame rate.

- Determine how long you need to film

In this case was about 15 minutes. I actually spend over an hour doing tests and seeing who different things came out, but I realized that what I needed was 7 seconds of footage to match with me music I got got that time lapse, meaning that if it was getting 1 frame every 5 seconds, I would have to make a simple math:

In order to get 1 second I needed to multiply 5 seconds (for 1 frame) x 25 which was my frame rate

5 x 25 = 125(seconds) = 2 minutes 5 seconds.

With this I knew that in 2 minutes and 5 seconds I was getting 1 second of footage. Now what I had to do was multiply 125 seconds x 7(which was the amount of seconds I needed of footage)

125 x 7 = 875 (seconds) = 14 minutes 58 seconds

And that is how I realized that I needed to be recording for 15 seconds in order to get 7 seconds of footage. Sorry for the heavy math!

http://www.stefanrtw.com/gopro-time-lapse-tips/

Me filming the first version of Time Lapse 

Apart from being a cinematographer and editor for my project of Sunday League, I decided to also help around by being the cinematographer of another project called I Pull The Strings, from Vittorio Falcucci and Ruby Rogers. This was actually a very good and nice experience because it happened a couple weeks after my shooting week, which allowed to explore a bit more working with a different team, different camera, different story and in a different environment in general. This allowed to see things that could have done different in my shoot, but also things we did right and how in this other one they could have been done different to make things easier. I think in this second one I did a better job in some aspects, because I had learned of some mistakes from the Sunday League shoot, like double checking the focus, taking my time and all that, which actually made a lot of difference. In I Pull The Strings, Vic was in charge of doing the lighting he wanted, but I was also there helping him with some inputs and my opinion on how it looked in the camera depending on the tone he wanted to set.

The first thing we did originally was to have a meeting where we went through the script, the story and the logistic of it. It was good to have a read at the script because it allowed me to know the type of scenes I was going to be involved with and also to understand the mood that in which the filmed developed, which actually made my job easier as I knew the kind of stuff I was looking for. On this one, I worked a lot with the director, Vic, as he knew pretty well what he wanted and at least the outcome of the shots, which allowed us to film more takes and different shots. The coverage of it was pretty big, we did a lot of different angles for each scene and Vic reviewed at least 90% of the shots that I filmed and more importantly was that within a day we had already built a trust relationship where he was trusting me in what I was doing and I was trusting that he knew what he wanted. This was probably one of the most important things, because one thing that no one really likes is someone behind you every minute checking if you are doing your job properly or not and although the director is meant to be checking the shots, if he had to hold a light or get out of the way in a shot, he trusted me, then reviewed it and said if it worked or not. It was actually quite good having a second opinion and another pair of eyes there at the moment checking every shot not only while filming, but also right after, going into playback and making sure that the shot was good. 

The second thing that worked for me very well, was learning different techniques and working with a Canon as well, which I am not very fond to, since I think they are more photography cameras rather than video filming. The first thing I did of course was getting used to the camera. I took it and played with it, made sure I knew where all the settings were, specially the main ones like your white balance, ISO, focus and zoom. We worked with two different lenses, one of them being a wide one and the other one more of a zoom one. The wide one was used in just a couple scenes where the room was small or I was too close to a wall, giving the illusion that the room was bigger or just to get more of the room in the shot. The zoom one was more of out standard lens which actually came put to be quite good. One of the things I didn't like in general about the Canon and the way of focusing with the lens, was that things get out of focus really easy. It is great for depth of field and getting some nice and sharp images, but also can also be a bit tricky when you want just a simple shot and slight movement gets people or objects out of focus. The tricky part with the Canon is that the focus ring is very small and since there is no guide of numbers for the focus, it is really hard to move and get someone in focus at the same time as you have nothing to guide yourself with. What I did in this case was to practice the shot a couple times with the movement from me and the actor so I could have an idea of how much I had to move the focus ring and in which direction in order to keep the image in focus all the time. It was really tricky to be honest and sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't, but I think that was probably the hardest thing to do in the whole shoot. 

The third and last thing I learnt and liked about being on I Pull The Strings, was the importance of setting up not just a shot but a whole scene. Very different to our case as Sunday League, they were a bit less limited in time in due to the majority of the locations being unrestricted and or unpaid, meaning that we had more time to set up every shot from rehearsing with the actors, to lighting, makeup, camera practice, etc. Sometimes we took about an hour in one same scene just shooting it over and over from different angles and different takes, just reassuring that we had what was needed for the final piece. It was good that I had a good relationship with the director as well and that he listened to me as his cinematographer as well, because although he knew well the majority of times what he wanted, there were cases in which a decision needed to be made or something was working or I had an idea for a shot and he actually listened and a lot of time took on board my opinion. I think that the most important thing in a shoot is that people actually work as a team and they are able to listen to each other, because the stress and the pressure a lot of times can get easily to you in this type of situations, preventing you from seeing things clearly and needing for some extra help. 

One last trick that we used for the camera was the use of tape at the top and bottom of the camera screen, to keep them as guide of what we were going to see if you added a widescreen frame to make it look like a movie, which was their case. This actually allowed me to know exactly where to frame and not leave anything to chance to be cropped in post when making the clips wide (See picture below). It was definitely great working with them and understanding how other people work because it allowed me to explore different ideas and learn different tricks and tips for any future shooting in which I could be involved. 

Carrying on with the last post in which I am talking about editing efficiently and tips from Oliver Peters and how the have managed to change my work in a positive way, I will introduce the fourth tip:

Don’t cut back to the exact same angle – If you have a choice of several camera angles, don’t automatically cut back to the same camera angle or take that you just used in the previous shot. This is, of course, unavoidable in a dialogue scene with only two angles and one take of each; but, if the director shot different takes with different framing, try to use a little of all of them. Don’t get stuck in a cutting rut, like master/single/reverse, master/single/reverse, etc. Mix it up.

This tip applied just for a very small portion of the film, because I realized that mainly the whole episode has a lot of dialogue apart from three main scenes which are the beginning in the football pitch, the nightclub scene and the ending again at the football pitch. This actually works quite nice because it allowed me to put this tip into action that I find myself very useful not just for this but for any future editing as well. I avoided 100% using the same shot or angle in the three scenes, because if there is no dialogue, the shots need to do the job of carrying us through the story (or action), meaning that the cuts in the edit have to be on point. Here are three still that I captured from my timeline in Final Cut Pro X, where you could appreciate how the cuts were done and how I don't repeat any angle at all:

Beginning Football Pitch 

Nightclub 

Ending Football Pitch

The fifth tip is:

Cut for the eyes – Actors that do well on TV and in films (as compared with the stage) are all very expressive with their face, but most importantly, their eyes. When I’m cutting an intense dialogue scene, I’m looking at how the actors’ eyes play in the scene. Do they convey the proper emotion? What is the reaction of the other actors in the scene? What the actors are or aren’t doing facially determines my cutting. It drives my decision to stick with the principal actor delivering the dialogue or whether I briefly cut away to see reactions from the others.

This is something very truthful and that I struggled with when it came down to editing a lot of the dialogue, because in some scenes the acting or the facial expression wasn't on point, meaning that it was harder to cut. We tried to have at least two takes of the same scene that worked at least 90% of it, just to make sure we had options, same with the ones that didn't work as well, we kept rolling just so we could have some extra options there. When I realized that a lot of the scenes were working, I took this on board and decided to carry on cutting not just by a scene that was looking good, but one that was transmitting emotion more importantly. Emotion and feelings is something that is not easy to show on camera, but even those really bad quality clips from phones, computer cameras and such, can transmit a lot if the content of it is on point. One of the things I decided to do in some of the shots at least, was to hold the shot for a but longer if the emotion of the actor was actually good and was making the scene more emotional, because sometimes making a cut where the audience is feeling attached to a moment, can actually destroy that moment completely so it is very important to know when to cut but also when not to. One example for this is the scene in which Dean is trying to convince Don to coach their team, by telling him the bad stuff they have been going through and how one of the players (Nath) got beaten up. This exact shot was held for 25 seconds without a cut, because all three characters in it develop through those 25 seconds with emotions and facial expressions, making the audience engage more with that scene:

The sixth and last tip is:

Shaping story – It is said that there are three films: the one that’s scripted, the one that’s been filmed and the one that’s edited. When you cut a feature, pay close attention to the story chronology and don’t be afraid to veer from what was written or filmed if it makes sense to do so. Many editors use note cards on a storyboard wall to create a quick visual representation of the storyline. This helps you make sure that you reveal things to the audience in the most logical order and that nothing is inadvertently edited out of place.

This played probably one of the biggest parts of the editing in general, because at first Danny and I were purely focusing on the script, not just from the preparation point of view, but also for filming and editing as well. This was a good up to a point, where we had to remember that things can make sense on paper, but maybe not screen. If you think of movies like Harry Potter, which is a 2 hour long  film (120 min) that came from a book of about 600 pages, was clearly reduced in length, because there is a lot of details that a book or a script can give you as a reader, but as a viewer they are unnecessary and can be discarded without ruining the essence of the story. At this point it was where we started to discard things because some of them were just filling and we didn't want to have filling really, taking into account that we only had about 22 minutes to tell a story from beginning to end (due to being a Pilot). One of the scenes that I got rid of was the one where the Ollie and Dean arrive at the Hall where Don is supposed to be and before entering the building, they bump into two of the bridesmaids which originally were going to sleep with them two later in the episode, but since that was changed, I thought there was no point on keeping that scene anymore because by getting rid of it, the story still flowed and nothing was lost really. 

Another example of this was the scene in which Dean calls Nathan to see where he is as he is meant to be playing football but there was no one there. Although in the scene it is important to understand what is happening, he never really implies that he is talking to Nathan or at any point we saw them planning seeing each other there on anything, which was discarded as well because in the next scene he is shown with some bruises as he got beaten up and in that scene is in which it is explained what happened, so going from Dean talking to Tom on the phone saying that he is going to watch Nath play for Strood and then seeing that it was a lie and he actually got beaten up, actually makes sense for the audience and it is not necessary to show that scene of him in the pitch anymore.

For more useful tips from Oliver, you can visit his blog which is filled with a lot of very useful content!

https://digitalfilms.wordpress.com/2008/12/16/12-tips-for-better-film-editing/

One of my biggest passions is editing and although is something I've been doing for over 10 years, I have just recently started doing it in a more professional environment, where I have time limits, other opinions and a script to guide. Throughout the years I have been learning a lot of things about editing, from making cuts to understanding the software itself. Editing for me is not just cutting and placing, but its an art on its own which gives life to any clip, because for as good as your scene can be, it is really hard that it can make any impact without being edited at all. For this project I decided to put  a lot of more effort into it and not only regarding editing more or trying new things, but actually learning and understanding a bit more about editing itself so I can make sure I am doing the right things and not wasting time doing a crap editing job.  This post is going to be about those tips that I researched on and took on board and how they changed or affected my editing directly.

While doing my research I cam across with a blog from a man named Oliver Peters, who is an independent video/film editor, colorist, post production supervisor and consultant. I decided to give a read to a lot of his posts and took from them a lot of tips that were really useful for me, starting with:

Cut tight – The best editing approach is to cut tight scenes without becoming too “cutty”. This means taking out unnecessary pauses between actors’ delivery of dialogue lines. Sometimes it mean tightening the gaps within dialogue sentences through the use of carefully placed cutaways. It may also mean losing redundant lines of dialogue, after the director has reviewed your cut.  In general, my approach is to start with a cut that is precise from the beginning as opposed to cutting the first pass sloppy and then whittling down from there. Most basic films don’t support audience attentions for lengths over 90 minutes. If your first cut comes in at about 100 minutes, then you can typically get to 90 through further tightening of the cut. On the other hand, if it clocks in at two hours or longer, then major surgery is going to be needed.

This particular point has probably been one of the most important, which links backs to a previous post regarding "Trimming the Fat." Originally the film was going to be around 29 minutes, but after watching lots of times and showing it to other people, it started to come across very long and dragging and having very unnecessary stuff that was bringing nothing to the story or the film itself. Sometimes you feel like you have to show people a lot of actions so they can understand how people move form one spot to the other or how they get an object, but what sometimes is hard to realize is that the audience is not stupid and they will do the 1 + 1 = 2, meaning that you don't have to treat them like babies and show them every single step. For more information about this you can refer to my post on "Trimming the Fat"

The second tip was:

Temp music – Many editors like working with temporary music as a placeholder. I advise against this for two reasons. First – people tend to fall in love with the temp score and then it’s hard to get real music that feels as good. Second – temp music becomes a crutch. You tend to be more forgiving of a weak scene when there’s interesting music than when the scene is naked. I prefer to cut a strong scene and make it work through editorial solutions. If a scene can stand on its own, then the addition of sound effects and a score will make it that much better. The exception is a visual montage set to music. Here, I tend to do better when I’m cutting to music rather than the other way around.

I completely agree with this and I believe this is so true and it used to be a mistake that used to make in the past and still sometimes hard to avoid it. Usually I tried to add music from the beginning to a scene, so people felt more emotion about it and although that is a lot of times the main purpose of the music, the scene on its own needs to be able to stand without music. If you have a cut scene that without the music is completely boring or you don't understand it, then all you really are doing is trying to hide a flaw in your edit. The idea behind this is not to use or at least avoid using music that is commonly known by people, because sometimes people really just care about the beat and don't get what the music is actually trying to tell you. In our show, I limited myself to using no music well known whatsoever apart from the scene where Ollie is singing in his room, because the idea behind this is that he is listening to the radio and making a laugh out of the Uptown Funk song.

One of the biggest issues that I had with this point, was the very beginning of the film, in which two teams are playing football, one gets fouled in the box, Ollie takes a penalty and misses, hitting a man peeing in the bushes. The idea originally was to have some music underneath all that to build tension and create a momentum in which as soon as he misses and hits the man, it would  become more of a joke and making the audience see that this is the kind of show they are about to watch. I struggled a lot and put a lot of songs and nothing was working out properly and the reason was because the scene actually didn't need any music. It was simple, the actions and the shots were telling the story and the intention, so instead of focusing on songs, I should have focused on creating atmosphere with natural sounds to make the scene work, which in the end did and that is how its staying for the final cut.

The third tip is:

Matching action – Matching actors’ hand positions, use of props, eyeline and stage position from one cut to another fall into the technical category of how to make a proper edit. Walter Murch offers a rule of six criteria that form reasons to make a cut at a given instance. The greatest weight is given to whether that cut drives the emotion of the scene or moves the story along. Technical matching is the least important concern. I’m not saying you should throw it out the window, because a mismatch that is too extreme can be very jarring to the audience. On the other hand, as an editor friend often tells me, “Matching is for sissies.” The audience will often ignore many minor continuity differences from one shot to the next if they stay totally engrossed in the story. Your job as the editor is to cut in such as way that they do.

https://digitalfilms.wordpress.com/2008/12/16/12-tips-for-better-film-editing/

This is a very important part of editing an something that I had to use a lot in this film, because matching actions can be very very important and it is really hard to film. As an editor, i am usually the first to notice all the types of mistakes that have been done regarding continuity and matching clips, because a lot of times some very minor things, like a hand gesture, could actually make things quite painful. Since this production in general has a lot of scenes and a lot of shots, it was even harder to make sure things were fine all the time and although as a cinematographer it was fully my job to keep an eye on that, I tried helping as much as I could when I had my shots set-up and everything. One example of matching action that didn't work originally and wasn't included in the film, not for this purpose but another one, was a scene in the car where Ollie is talking about a kid in a suit and makes a move looking hopeless in which he moves his head down and in one clip he brings his hands up and in the other he doesn't, making it really hard to make a cut there. Here you can see there difference in both shots:

via GIPHY

via GIPHY

Another example of something minor in this case that is harder to see but happens and is proof of how hard it can be to keep things the same everytime, is a scene toward thee end where Dean is talking to Lucy in the kitchen and the mug he holds changes orientation in two different clips. This is something very minor that even as an editor I didn't notice until more than a month after filming, but I believe that this doesn't really affect the flow of the story and unlike the scene with Ollie in the car, it doesn't give the audience any reason to feel that we have jumped to a different action or moment. 

Mug facing right 

Mug facing left