It’s late. I’m tired. I have to get up tomorrow and teach before presenting Spammer to the Writing with Video class. As part of our final project, we were asked to comment on our creative process over the last several weeks. I wanted to do this in the form of another “video production diary,” but I’m just too tired! I may still post another one with some clips and a “trailer” for the film, but it might not be until next week due to my busy schedule!
Filming was done a couple of weeks ago. Tonight I am done with the editing. How does this make me feel? Good, in some ways. I’m happy with the way the project turned out, although I think it still lacks polish. I didn’t have time to adjust any of the colors or make a soundtrack – those things will have to come later. My goal for this class was to at least have a final, edited version of the film that I could present. I believe I accomplished this.
I had a couple of minor set backs during the editing process
I ran out of hard drive space on the “loaner” Macbook that I’ve been using for the film editing. To solve this problem, I had to basically uninstall anything that wasn’t completely necessary to complete the film. I was working with very large clips to preserve the quality, so that took priority over anything else on the hard drive.
While trying to clear space on the hard drive, I accidentally deleted thirty clips from the film. Luckily, these clips were all still on the camera, but it took me a couple of hours to find them and put them back in sequence.
I also had a problem with the climactic section of the film (where Spammer reveals his occupation to his date). For some reason, every time I tried to edit that clip the computer gave me an error message, and not a helpful one either – it just said “General error” and stopped whatever I was doing. To solve this problem, I ended up having to go back to the source material, reload the video from the camera and start that section over.
Overall, I would say that my process was fairly organized, but I tried to be flexible about things; in other words, I tried to maintain a balance between control and improvisation in all aspects of this film. While I was filming, I focused on controlling the environment, the lighting, the camera angles, etc., but I gave the actors freedom to improvise for the most part. There were very few pre-scripted lines in the film. The entire date conversation was improvised by the actors, and Spammer’s phone conversation was also improvised (I was on the other end of the phone). The only scripted line in the film was Spammer’s final statement to his date about the nature of his job, but even that was partially improvised. My reason for choosing not to script the action more closely was that I wanted there to be a certain element of awkwardness to the humor. I wanted it to seem natural and off-the-cuff. I also wanted the actors to be a little uncomfortable, since that’s how their characters were supposed to feel.
When it came to editing, I had a strong concept of what I wanted to do floating around in my head, but I didn’t make any storyboards. I kept fairly detailed notes during the process so as not to forget things, but these were more technical points. Most of my time was spent synching up the multi-frame sections of the film, which I think worked out very well. In fact, while I think some parts of the movie plod a little, I’m very pleased with the multi-frame parts, and think they were very successful. In particular, there’s a segment where frames of spam messages overtake the screen and Spammer curses as he pounds his delete key to make them disappear. This clip alone took me a couple of hours to get right, but I think it was worth it.
While editing the film, I had two priorities – I wanted to tell the story well, but I also wanted to be efficient with my time. There were a few bits that I had to cut out (and more I may still cut out) that only served to make the narrative drag on too long. My goal was to get the film down to fifteen minutes. I was close (17:52), but didn’t quite make my goal. It’s possible I’ll still be able to shave off those three minutes, but I’m not too worried about it.
Going forward with this piece, I have two goals:
1) to take advantage of whatever criticism I receive in class tomorrow and improve the editing, and
2) to add all the finishing touches (soundtrack, color correction, end credits, etc.
Hopefully, if all goes well, I’ll be able to have the final version online and available for download in early May. I want the film to be available in higher quality than what Youtube allows, so rather than posting it there, I’ll probably make it available as a torrent that people may download through the blog. I’ll have more details on that once everything is finished.
