Sweet Dreams - Post-Production Process

Editing is the process of selecting and preparing audible and film to create a piece of media. The editing process can involve correction, condensation, organization, and many other modifications performed before the final piece is released as this allows the editors to solve any issues that have occurred or work around them to create a complete piece work.

Here we'll be explaining what software and techniques we used during Post-Production of our final film and how we got round any issues that came up during the editing process. In this process we used After Effects, Premiere Pro and Audacity to create our final product.

While filming the scenes in Jamie's bedroom, we needed a bright light that would shine through as his door opened and then would stay there for the rest of the scene. We were unable to do this practically and instead opted to create the effect within Adobe After Effects. I started by lightening the original footage and added a soft glow around to give to create the brighter light effect, I then overlaid the new brighter footage onto our original footage in the composition sequence. Once I'd done that, I created a mask and animated it to look as if a door was opening and the light was casting onto the bedding and onto the bedding. With the mask being animated, it allowed me to control how the light acted within the shot and how fast or how slow the door opened to create the effect.



 

We then exported these scenes out of After Effects and then added into our Premiere Pro Edit File which would allow us to continue editing the film. With the help of After Effects, this allowed us to create the sequence we originally envisioned but weren't able to achieve on the day due to lighting issues and not being able to create a light source bright enough to create this effects.

 

 

We were also able to add this effect to the rest of the sequence which made the scene look more realistic as the light didn't vanish within the next shot. As well as the light source, we also darkened the surrounding room, this emphasised the light which made the sequence look more mysterious and the light source look more supernatural and alien to create a sense of unease in the audience. 

 

 

The next thing we did was adding a layer to most of the film, expect the sequence in Jamie's bedroom and the ending sequence, this gave the whole film the dream/nightmare feel to it which also helped the audience differentiate between the real life sequences and the dream/nightmare sequences.

 

This was achieved by using a channel blur by turning the percentage of the blue and red channels up 50 which created the coloured outlines of each character and object within the scene, we also added Gaussian Blur of 120% and a feather of 759.0% and Lens Distortion with a curvature of -10 to the edges which would warp/distort the footage and create the completed dream sequence.

 

 

 

A problem we encountered while adding this layer was during some scenes the effect became too much and would blur the entire shot which mean for some shots we had to go through and adjust the amounts for each effect so that it would remain constant throughout the whole short film.

 

 

The final big effect we did was adding a mask around Jamie to make it look as if he's in total darkness and is being trapped in eternal darkness. This was achieved by adding an oval mask around the character, inverting it so the effects were added around Jamie rather then in front and then adjusted the darkness to -100 and the contrast to 100 which created the blacked-out background as well as the look of eternal darkness.

 

In the overall film, we also enlarged a lot of the clips which removed unnecessary background and large open spaces within the frame which could take away from the scene and distract the audience, this was mainly visible during some close ups and medium shots, especially within the corridor scenes as there were a lot of shots which showed more of the background and objects in the corridors, this took away from the viewing experience and distracted the audience as focus would be on the background as it was more noticeable. With Premiere Pro we also added a letterbox wide-screen movie format which made our film look more cinematic and appealing to the audience.

 

We also used After Effects to create the credits at the end of the sequence. We used a free After Effect template which made creating the credits a lot easier and made them look more professional as all the writing was pre-set to move at a certain pace in time with each other which made this a lot easier as we didn't have to waste time matching everything up and could instead focus on finishing the film.

 

 

And finally we used Audacity to adjust Sam's vocal performance as El Cucuy, people agreed his voice was menacing and fitted the character but could still be improved upon which is why we used Audacity. We looked for inspiration for adjustments we could make to the voice which is where we came across a Doctor Who character called The Candy man which featured in a serial called 'The Happiness Patrol' and was broadcast from 2nd - 16th November 1988, for the voice of this character, the special sounds office at the BBC overlaid two copies of the recorded dialogue but at different pitches, one was the original recording and the other had been adjusted from a G to an E which created this distortion between the two when played back which is what we liked as the distorted voice could represent El Cucuy's distorted personality. So to create this, we used Audacity to lower the pitch of our voice and then exported both the normal sound file and adjusted sound file together which created the distorted and unnerving voice that is featured in our final piece.