Tuesday, March 31, 2020

Lip Reading (Post-Production Day #6)

Earlier, Jake and I started the editing of what we guess is the most complex scene in the film. What I mean by guess is that, in theory, the park should have been a quick edit; however, it’s been the most painstaking micro-editing yet. So this bay comparison is expected to be harder, THAT MUCH HARDER. Why you may ask? Because every single recoding in from this entire day has NO SOUND. Why is that? Well, because I forgot to turn on the camera’s microphone. Funny right? Ha! And they say God doesn’t have a sense of humor. 

Thankfully, we decided to record with external audio as well; otherwise, we would be S-C-R-E-W-E-D. But because there is no sound in any of the clips, this scene makes Jake’s job a little tougher, because he has to lip read the videos and try his best to piece the scene together with the audio like that. And of course, if Jake’s job becomes harder than naturally so does mine because it means I have to be more detailed and more precise when tightening editing and checking his edits. 

After waiting a good chunk of time for Jake to be done with the first draft, I went in to check it and fix it up. After watching the draft time and time again, I started catching little mistakes
and flaws to fix. As I did that I realized something that would make my editing not only harder but slower. A great majority of the audio clips Jake put the videos with did not actually correspond to those takes. The actors delivered a very consistent performance, so I don’t blame Jake for not noticing, but looking at it under a magnetizing glass, it is crystal clear. And the more I noticed it, the more obvious it became. 

And so I began editing, constantly having to run the scene time and time again until it felt like torture to find the exact frame where a character’s lip moved to produce a certain time and try my very best to match it with the right audio. All of the external audio is in a voice memo program on my phone so sometimes I have to try to match them while seeing the video on my computer and listening to the audio with headphones to prevent losing time with the wrong audio file. I’m trying to lip read and trot my memory to remember what that specific take sounded like.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the original unedited video to show you, and I’m just simply too far into the editing process like to show you key progress as it would give away too much of the scene. On the other hand, my editing is coming great so far! So far I have focused on just paring audio and with the videos and that has come with some basic frame-by-frame editing of the scene but nothing too extreme or drastic just yet. I’ll keep doing this for the next day or two until I’m ready to move on to audio mixing and leveling.

Signing off, 

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