Rough Cut Evaluation

Discussing Pickups

Once a draft was completed from what we had filmed so far, I uploaded it to Google Drive to share it with my film partner without changes in quality effecting the rough cut. We decided to watch it individually and make notes of what we thought would improve the film or needed to be changed before sharing it with one another and later exchanged them.

She agreed with me that scene 1's lighting was too dark. Ultimately, no editing I was able to do could make it look brighter or cinematically intended for meaning. It simply looked like bad lighting and lack of clear narrative, as you could not see the makeup on the actress playing Abby, who is supposed to portray a girl suffering from drug addiction.

The ending of scene 1 and beginning of scene 2.

From an editing perspective, this scene's lighting also contrasted too heavily with scene 2's lighting, making the transition of scenes incredibly harsh and not aesthetically pleasing. Actress playing Abby, cannot be seen at the very end either, where she ends off her sentence staring at her reflection by saying 'I'll stop Pam. I will.' This meant that the scene would have to be redone under better lighting conditions as a pickup as soon as possible to meet the final cut deadline.

Besides that, my film partner saw the vision I had to create a jagged editing style involving cutaways/flashbacks when Pam is staring at her own reflection. It creates a narrative parallel, as both Abby and Pam (after pickups) will have scenes of them staring at their own reflections. 

The ending of the rough cut will need sound changes, but nonetheless displayed the intention behind adding in scenes that could extend this scene's reminiscing period and carry onto the next.

I could edit these scenes to jump-cut from the past to present versions of Pam's reality without her friend to sync with beats of a song that reflects the lost state that Pam is in; having vivid memories of her friend Abby, but Abby no longer being alive despite how lively this reminiscing will be portrayed in the film. This requires revisions to our storyline, but does not take away any of its original ideas, but rather enhances them with efficient editing to prolong the film and strengthen our vision.

Sound Design Reflection

Another thing mentioned was that my attempt at doing a voiceover to mimic diegetic sound was weak and needed to be redone. The audio of Pam's mother walking into her room, disrupting the reaction Pam was having from watching the 'home video' on her laptop, sounded unnatural. I also added in steps walking away that Adobe Premiere Rush had in its sound effect library, but this as well did not blend easily with the scene and sounded out of place as it was too loud, put in early, and was inconsistent audio of someone walking out of a room. More specifically, the audio of Pam's mother speaking, sounded as though she was behind the camera, but in the scene, her voice needs to sound like it is slightly afar to the left, as she has just entered the room.

The scene in which my film partner and I agreed needed a lot of work. The sound goal going forward is to get it to sound as diegetic as possible.

Planning a Resolution

Some solutions I thought of upon reflection was to create the diegetic sound myself of the door opening alongside the mother speaking to Pam and walking out to go over the scene of Pam reacting to it. This would possibly work by being recorded on Apple's voice memo app and edited on Adobe with the reduce background noise and enhance speech tools.

After this scene, the sound should then transfer to very quiet, almost white noise sound to convey the emptiness Pam feels in her grief and pick up again with music that fades in slowly, becoming full volume when Pam is staring at her reflection, synced memories to the beat.

As this was a rough cut, I was well aware of what needed work involving the sound, as it was intended to be a guideline for what the film would sound like. However, my biggest concern as editor was that the film was too short. Altogether, this rough cut averaged a little over a minute and my goal was to get it very close to 2 minutes so that this opening would incorporate as much of our skills and lessons learned as possible, so the addition of new scenes for Pam to 'think back on' along with inputting the revisions my film partner and I decided on should bring us closer to a final cut we can both be proud of.