This is our last week to film before our production is due, since our director / male lead is away during mid-term break. We first filmed on Monday at Dr. Mok's office, finishing all our office scenes, then filmed the street & home scenes at Wing Kwan's house on Thursday. In this post, I will discuss and reflect on my contribution to the following areas:
Preparation for Post-Production
At the beginning of the filming sessions, I would help with initialising the SD card to make sure the card format is compatible with my laptop. After every filming session, I imported all of the footage onto my laptop - on which I have installed Final Cut Pro X so I could edit during mid term break. After checking the Final Cut Pro preferences (selected "create optimised media" and "create proxy media"), I have started logging the footage from last week's shoot by naming them and making use of the reject / favourite function to organise the clips.
Logistics (Time Management, Equipment, Locations, Props, etc.)
As the editor, my job largely focuses on the post-production stage. Therefore, during the production stage, I helped with borrowing equipment and reserving locations (communicating with Dr. Mok about using her office). We made a lot of changes to our production plan. Originally, we planned to film our office scenes at Wing Kwan's house, but after location scouting, we decided that Dr. Mok's office is the ideal setting to film our scenes since her office has blinds which we could use to create the iconic venetian blind effect in film noir. We also hoped to finish filming all our scenes by the beginning of the second week of October, but due to our team's miscommunication and our busy schedules, we completed most of the filming during the third week of October. In the second week, we spent two class periods at her office filming, but we did make much progress from those two sessions, since it took us almost half the period to get ready (setting up equipment and changing into costumes) to film as we were still in the process of re-familiarising ourselves with the using the equipment.
It was difficult to find a time when everyone is free to film - on Monday, Henry could only participate in the first half of the shoot; on Thursday, Charlotte couldn't attend the session. This may have impacted the quality of our film since Charlotte / Henry had to control the camera and hold the microphone at the same time by themselves since Wing Kwan and I were acting. During our Thursday shoot, we found Hadrien to help us act as the "knowledge dude" in our film, but the issue was that he was in a hurry to leave and with only around fifteen minutes left, we were therefore in a rush to finish filming his scenes. Meanwhile, we could not get the microphone to work properly, hence we will have to do voiceovers afterwards. From my point of view, the situation was slightly out of control as the scene was added to the script after our cinematographer finished the storyboard and we had to decide on the spot about what shot types to use for that scene. What we should've done is to plan out the shots beforehand with the cinematographer, especially because she could not attend the session. We should have also reconfirmed with each other about the shooting dates to make sure everyone can participate and to avoid any confusion (we borrowed equipment and then returned it right afterwards as we realised we were not shooting).
It was difficult to find a time when everyone is free to film - on Monday, Henry could only participate in the first half of the shoot; on Thursday, Charlotte couldn't attend the session. This may have impacted the quality of our film since Charlotte / Henry had to control the camera and hold the microphone at the same time by themselves since Wing Kwan and I were acting. During our Thursday shoot, we found Hadrien to help us act as the "knowledge dude" in our film, but the issue was that he was in a hurry to leave and with only around fifteen minutes left, we were therefore in a rush to finish filming his scenes. Meanwhile, we could not get the microphone to work properly, hence we will have to do voiceovers afterwards. From my point of view, the situation was slightly out of control as the scene was added to the script after our cinematographer finished the storyboard and we had to decide on the spot about what shot types to use for that scene. What we should've done is to plan out the shots beforehand with the cinematographer, especially because she could not attend the session. We should have also reconfirmed with each other about the shooting dates to make sure everyone can participate and to avoid any confusion (we borrowed equipment and then returned it right afterwards as we realised we were not shooting).
Cinematography
Since I am the editor, my role focuses on the post-production stage. During the filming sessions, I shared my ideas with the group about the framing and the lighting, even though the final decision is still made by the director and cinematographer. Throughout the production stage, I have started thinking about how I would edit the film - for example, in the scene of the male lead dying, I would like to try adjusting the frame to make it seem like the shot was filmed with a dutch angle, since this is one of the major characteristics of film noir that I don't think we used during our production stage. I would also like to try adjusting the colour scheme of the shots in the opening scene / ending scene and apply a blue / purple tint to it (Wong Kar-wai editing style). After reviewing the footage, I also noticed that some shots are quite bright / do not have a strong contrast between black and whites, therefore during post-production, I would like to try adjusting the contrast to emphasise the use of chiaroscuro lighting in our film. Unfortunately, there were some construction noises during our Tuesday shoot, and we made the mistake of not turning off the air-conditioner sound during our Thursday shoot, so I will have to work on noise cancelling when editing. At the end of each filming session, I would review the footage and make sure that the visual and audio quality is okay, looking out for what we could improve for our next shoot. We also filmed some of the scenes from different angles so that I can decide which one best fits our film when editing.
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