Colour Grade

First colour grading:
The first image is original one. Through this picture we can see that there is no editing of colour in it. The background color is very nature as footage was shot in an indoor place. The light was incandescent so the actress looks more realistic.

The second image was edited by using the three colour effect. When we drag in the colour effect to the video, three section of colour effects will shows up: Shadows, Midtones and Highlights. We use these three section of colour to edit the colour of video. In this footage, i changed the Shadows towards the blue, changed the Midtones towards a little more purple and changed the Highlights one towards light pink.I want to make the colour of footage darker, so I upped the Input Levels a little bit.  So that is the result of it.

The  colour of the third image is more soft. In this image,I made the Shadow more red. So when we look at the shadow, we can see that the colour of shadow are more red than the original image. I also changed the Highlight more towards yellow. So in this image, we can see that the colour of ceiling is light yellow. So the whole colour of these picture looks more warm.

The last picture is very dark, because I wanted to edit it to be totally different from the rest. So I upped the level of Input and also turned up the Tonal Range Definition but in this image is hard to see  Bronte’s face.

#2.The second colour grading

This is original one, this one is shot outside.

The second one is of a very warm tone, the shadow and Midtone is leaning toward red  and the highlight is leaning toward a little bit  of light yellow so the colour of image does not change too much.

The third one is cold in tone, because I wanted to edit an opposite style to the last one. In this image the colour of the window and the bricks is leaning more towards blue tones, which give it a vintage sort of feel.

I am satisfied with the last one’s colour, because this image looks more realistic. It gives a more cinematic feel to it. I am satisfied when I look at this colour version of the footage.

#3

This image is the original one.

The colour of the second image is leaning more towards warm tones. The whole image colour is yellow, so the colour of this image is more old school.

I edited the colour of this image to blue. As this shot was taken in a room with lights that were leaning towards more cold tones, I tried to increase the colour to make it more cold by turning the Shadow, Midtones, and Highlight into blue color.

The color of last image is really similar to the third one, but the only difference is that the colour is more evenly spread out.

keyboard shortcuts

When we talk about keyboard shortcuts, the two keyboard shortcuts that come into my mind are Command+C and Command+V. These two shortcuts are very commonly used in workshop office and in other software.

Keyboard shortcuts are very useful for workers to speed up their work efficiency. I used to use Photoshop to edit images, and I realized that by using the keyboard shortcuts it really does save time as I don’t need to use mouse to open a new folder or to save the document as the keyboard shortcuts can do all of these. Another funny thing about it is that when you get used to using keyboard shortcuts, you may forget where and how to find those function in toolbar.

We now use Premier to edit videos, before this I had never used it before. Therefore, this software is still quite new to me. I only know very basis keyboard shortcuts in this software, like how to use keyboard shortcuts to save, undo, copy, paste and select all, and another one is starting the cutting of video by pressing ‘I’ and the ending of it by pressing ‘O’. Of course those keyboard shortcuts are very basis for beginners.  So I searched on Google to find more keyboard shortcuts that were used in Premiere, and I found a lot that were very useful and saved a lot of time during the editing process. But it is really hard for people who are beginners in using Premiere to remember all of the keyboard shortcuts

Lenny – reflection on

 Lenny – reflection on

1 Pre-production

Before we shot the short film, we had to prepare a shot list, shooting order and floor plan. These are the normal things to do first when producing a film. But to be honest, I really failed in planning the shot list, shooting order and floor plan. When we got the Lenny script, I had a look at it and it was all about the story. I was confused on what I had to do for the shot list, shooting order and floor plan. We needed to discuss about the different kinds of shot to be used and the feeling that each shot created, whether it was a wide shot or MS-medium shot and why we wanted to use it. When Andrea drew the floor plan on the whiteboard with the camera positions and shots labelled, I was totally confused. Personally, I feel that I am not very good at planning and lack the ability to think creatively but I believe that with more experience I will get better at it.

2 Production

When preparing to shoot the Lenny story, we needed to set up the mixer, earphone, camera and some other gear. It was a lot of fun because we had to swap roles during production as Andrea wanted us to get familiar with the various roles in production. I thought I did very well as a boom swinger, which is basically just holding boom to record the actor’s or actress’s voices. This job is very simple, but it is physically very tiring. Another thing that was hard to do was when I tried to record the dialogue between the actors. It was easy to record one of the actor’s voice who faced the front towards the boom, however it was hard to record the other actor who faced the other side because I could not simply move the boom as it might get in frame.

Another thing is that we may sometimes have some problems with equipment, like when we first started to shoot Lenny there were some problems with the sound equipment. It was not because we set it up wrongly but because there were some problems with the cables. Therefore, we could only hear the sound from one earphone.

3 Post-production

This part is not just about the cutting of the video, we also need to think about how the footage would be matched together. When cutting and matching the footage of Lenny walking down the stairs and of him walking in the lane, I was unable to make these two shots match up nicely. The video looked very rough and there was not much connection between the two shots, and the worse part is that I did not realize that it looked weird or wrong when I combined these two together.

When I finished the rough cut, I had just done the cutting of the video. So when the rough cut is played, we can hear that the audio levels change constantly between the shots. In some shots, the volume of the dialogue was very low that we could barely hear what is being said and in others the sound of the air conditioning was very high. I made some changes to the volume levels, making the dialogue higher and the air conditioning sound lower. I also added ambient sound to the whole video with the intention of getting a better balance across the shots. I cut the best part of the ambience audio, about a few seconds worth of ambient sound, and copy the short audio clip across the whole video. However, it sounded a bit weird when played as a whole because there were slight pauses in between each of the ambient sound clips.