This scene will give me grey hair (Post-Production Day #4)

I mentioned earlier that editing scene two might be a pain because of the pacing, boy was I wrong! Editing scene two isn’t a pain, its the VEIN OF MY EXISTENCE!! The pace in this scene is somewhat odd and what’s even worst and more complex to get right with this one if the audio leveling. This is a micro editing nightmare!!

When we were shooting this scene we were outdoors on a somewhat windy day meaning all of our audio sounds heavily muffled. That combined with the distance we sometimes had between the actors and us while filming makes for some pretty tricky audio to work with. I have gone back and revisited this scene multiple times at multiple times of day to try to figure out what to do with it; how to fix it. I’ve gone in at 2pm to do it, I’ve gone in at 2 am and it seems no matter what I do it never feels right.

What I realized is that I should probably concentrate on fixing the pace by trying to choose a score to match it to. Unfortunately, I did that at 2am so my brain thought it was a good idea to match it to music inspired by the Pirates Of The Caribbean movies. I think you know where this is going. You don’t? Oh great because I didn’t know what I was doing either! In retrospect that wasn’t the best music choice. But it was what I was working with to fix the pace. Jake had done the macro editing so I knew that the scenes matched up well together and that there was a general flow, my job was to tighten it up to make it smooth. After I’d done a tolerable job (yeah maybe I’m being a bit harsh on my self but there’s little room for mistakes on this one) I decided to attack the sound issue.


Take a look at this exert:

This is an exert of scene 2 before any micro editing was done. This is the raw material I’m working with, the pacing might feel off but that’s mostly due to the lack of an accompanying music score which could really help tighten the editing and fix the odd pace feeling. Primary notice how the muffled the audio is, it’s hard to hear and there are hard cuts. This exert on the bottom is with a few fixes to the sound:

I remembered we had a boom mic all along and that all we had to do for more crisp audio was to
match it correctly to each video! I used a mix of the actual audio from the camera and the boom to help achieve better audio quality. There’s still a lot of work to be done with this scene. The music has to change, the pacing has to be adapted, the editing has to be tighter, and the sound has to be leveled. But at least for now, I’m confident knowing I found a possible fix for our audio problem, we just have to be super detailed about the way we go about matching them to our visuals. I’m going to keep working on this scene for some time, it could really use the extra hours of attention!

Here is the exert with the corrections with some music:

Signing off,