Day 13 of 20 Licensing and DVD menu

   Today was a very exciting day.  Devon from Provident Music called me in regards to an awesome Christian song that we are looking to get the rights to use in the movie.  After a wonderful chat with him, he passed me onto another guy who will be working out some of the details and hopefully we can press forward with licensing.  This is an entirely new process that is both terrifying and exciting.  I don't know exactly what to expect, but I know that God is in charge and will see this project through.

DVD Studio Pro - Slow Fade Main Menu in Progress

   Another exciting aspect of the day was completing the rough draft of the DVD menu. It is very exciting to see each of these individual parts of the whole come together. The DVD menu has surpassed my expectations and is promising to be one of the most rewarding elements to complete as I can now see the light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak. Realizing that this will be the first impression many will get of Slow Fade as they pop the DVD in for the first time.
   There is still much to be done, and I'm looking forward to finishing the rest of the content that will be on the DVD. And hopefully having a little time to produce a few more trailers for you guys and for promoting the movie.

Day 9 of 20

Tomorrow I will be rendering out what could be the final render of slow Fade. It has been nearly three years in the making and it feels good to be so close to finishing. If all goes well then there will only be a few audio corrections that still need to be made as well as working out the final licensing on all of the songs. It is very likely that Slow Fade will be complete by the end of the 20 working days. Let's see how things turn out tomorrow.

Day 8 of 20 Color Grading

So I've spent the last few months working on color correction and then color grading. You might ask if you've already color corrected the footage then what's the purpose of color grading? Let me briefly explain the differences between the two. Color correction is the process of relighting, and white balancing the clips to remove any unwanted color tint the footage may have picked up. Commonly footage will come onto the computer with a yellowish or blueish tint. These colors must be neutralized paying special attention to the skin tones making sure that they are the right color to make the actors look good. Color correction also aims to make sure each clip flows nicely and looks the same as the clip preceding and following it. Color grading is then taking the corrected sequences and adding artistic tints, color effects, or changing the saturation to achieve 3 different purposes.
1. Give it a look.
Often times when you go into a movie you expect that particular movie to have a certain look. Sometimes this is achieved by over or under saturating the entire movie or sequences in the movie. Sometimes it involves adding a tint of one color or another to make it look like it came from an different period.
2. Give it a mood.
Colors often affect our moods. The subtle addition of blue for instance reminds us of cold or even a lonely feeling. Red puts us in a state of caution or anger. And yellow/gold warms and makes us happy. These colors are often used to create a specific mood that the colorist wants you to be in at a certain moment.
And lastly,
3. It tells a story.
Along with putting us in the right mood often times colors are used to tell the story and keep things clear for the audience. For instance in our movie the color of Thomas's shirt change from to scene to scene showing us the spiritual place of Thomas's heart. Going from medium colors down to black colors then once again returning to the lighter colors. In the same way many of the scenes colors will give you cues as to the metaphysical meanings of the scenes so that you can discover more than just the action or dialogue in that scene.

As you can see color grading is a very unique and powerful tool to help create better, more emotional, and clear storylines. And though you may not always notice it the colors can help navigate your subconscious to the right emotions and feelings.

Day 7 of 20 Cutting a Scene or sequence

   Only 13 days away from the final draft of Slow Fade and yet we still are cutting away entire scenes and sequences. As the writer and director it is very hard to make the choice to remove scenes that you have spent months on perfecting. But it is necessary to remove anything that does not push the story forward or reveal an important truth about your characters. If there is a special edition of the dvd I'll have to break down all of the deleted scenes and why we cut them.
   Today I cut one full scene and a sequence. And although it is hard to cut something that you've spent so much time on it is a sacrifice that will make the movie a better more engaging show.
   The scene that I cut today was removed for two reasons. The first is that some of the elements were not explained enough beforehand so without context they were confusing to the audience. Another reason is that the scene did not push the movie enough forward. The dramatic content was not dynamic enough to justify leaving the scene in. Even though there were many pros for leaving the scene in, including the fact that it was completely edited and the composer already wrote a score for the scene, the cons outweighed leaving it in the final cut.
   The sequence that I removed today was for a different set of reasons. The first was that I was not pleased with the quality of the shots. We shot them in low light and the camera did not have a large enough processor to capture a crisp clean image. Besides being inferior in quality, the scene was redundant in explaining a point. In previous scenes we established everything that would have been said in this particular sequence. So in order to keep the flow moving effectively we removed the sequence.
 
At this point I'm hoping that those will be the last cuts. But each scene must be analyzed carefully to make sure that they drive the story forward and make the most compelling movie that they can. By the end of this week the final cut should be finished excluding the week and a half of audio work that needs to be done.

Day 3 of 20 Post Production Lighting

   Here's something you may not know about the movie making industry.  Almost every shot that you see in a movie has been re-lit in post production.  When I'm working as a colorist (One of the many hats I wear) Almost always re-lighting a shot is the second thing I do.  The first being to balance the colors. Re-lighting consists of primarily 3 different forms.
   The first is simple exposure and lighting balance.  Taking each clip and adjusting the blacks, whites and mid-tones to their right levels.  The second form is adding power windows or masks.  These are typically areas of the scene that I want to direct the audiences attention to.  For instance someone's face.  So I add a window around that persons face so that I can lighten just the face making it ever so slightly stand out from everything else.  This is done in such a small way that it takes a very keen eye to spot the difference.  And yet subconsciously everyone notices.  The last type of correction I will use is the vignette.

The tried and true method for focusing ones eye on the area of the screen you want them to.  A vignette is basically like a frame with a soft gradient edge. Like the one to the left.
When placed over an image with a lower opacity the vignette is hardly visible but manipulates the image so that your eye is drawn to the focal point.

This shot combines both the primary re-lighting as well as the vignette.

Day 2 of 20 Compositing Continued

Having analyzed the motion of the original clip the day before, I was able to copy that information to the new layer so that it would track with the original. The next big step was to relight and correct the colors so that both layers blended together. But with much patience this task was accomplished. And the final touch was to add some video noise. With that complete I was able to export it. And here's how it turned out.

Let me know what you think about it in the comments.

Day 1 of 20 Color Correction and Compositing

Today I had the pleasure of touching up the images in a process known as color correction.  So the majority of the day was spent looking at scopes, adjusting colors for each and every clip in a sequence from the middle of the movie.  Although this set of clips was not extremely challenging, the set of clips took several hours to work through as the process is quite time consuming.  After working through a few scenes I started work on a composite.

Compositing for the particular shot I'm working on consists of replacing a cell phone screen with a new screen.  I got a late start and left it half done but I thought I'd share with you some of the steps to creating a composite shot like this one.

The first thing that I did was create the overlay screen.  To do this I set up a camera to record the new screen.  After I brought the new recording onto my computer I stabilized the footage so that it had no movement and saved that file.

Now that I had my new screen prepared I was ready to set up a project file for the new composite.  I brought in the clip with the screen I wanted to replace and had the computer track the movement of the cell phone.  This information will be used to tell the computer where to put the new screen so that it will move with the cell phone's movement.

And the last step I did before leaving work was to take the new screen and add it as a layer to my project.  Then I cropped out everything but the screen to leave me with the perfect image to have over the top of the cell phone.  Tomorrow I will finish this composite and hopefully show you the final results.

20 Days Until the Final Cut

The countdown has begun. In the next 20 days I will be wrapping up the final touches of the movie Slow Fade. Each night I will share the important news of the day along with any interesting facts or progressions. So stay tuned as the team at ClockWorkCinema moves from the editing stage into the marketing stage.