Before Production we wanted to go ahead and take on any of the timing issues.
EDITED PREVIS
Using the previs video that we already had, I went and chopped up the video and slowed down shots. I got rid of one of the first shots since we were told there was a lot of just walking, which I had intended to be the lull before the storm but was advised that this just came across as bland. Noting down that we should bring in the camera for this second clip I also adjusted the starting points of some of the clips as well. I then went ahead and slowed down some of the running shots and edited the sound a bit better until it fitted. With this we could look to adjust our previs file in Blender with an idea of timing and focus on how we can change the camera.
I then had went to our previs file and reexported a shot with adjusted camera, to bring it in a bit closer and see how it looked. I think even bringing this shot in closer could work for the final one, with a longer runtime on the shot to let it breathe a bit more.
I then went and edited this new shot into the edited previs that I had made and I slowed this doen. I still think that there is something off about the previs so I will discuss this with my other team members and see what they think.
AUDIO
The other reason why I went ahead and got this edited previs done, was so that we could look to play with out BGM. This isn’t a big strength of mine but I still wanted to try and create some version that could help the more experienced members of my group work to our conclusion. I went and shared the file with Kori, since he had also been looking at some potential BGM from games he liked and was enthusiastic about creating some original elements.
The idea I was going for in this audio was this mystery that goes into tension and then is brought back to the start again. These songs don’t particularly work together but it was a good experiment to see combinations. I’m very happy that Kori is helping with this because I can find somber and mysterious songs, but Kori is really good at finding the high energy and tense ones.
With this first pass I had also went to check on any of Kori’s work and gave some feedback on this:
After looking through the rest of the audio that I had picked out, as well as some of Kori’s I felt like they didn’t fit well, and this was probably because they were a bit too scifi/didn’t match the genre of our short film. So, I decided to go and have a better search of more fitting songs- trying to match our medieval-esque genre and for this I turned to the Legend of Zelda and Fable. Then I went and asked if Kori could transfer these to MP3’s so I could play with them.
Start music:
Chase Music:
For MEET ZANT I thought that we could take some of the SFX and add these to ambient sound, almost like the Indiana Jones clip that inspired this plot.
I then put these into my edited previs to see if they would fit certain elements better than my previous attempts.
Temple of Light + Escape Chase
Old Town + Ganondorf Battle
Sealed Temple + Succumb to Twilight
Meet Zant
I then had put in a message about some necessary SFX that changed the tone once our character trips, and after this I had brought it up privately to Kori, since it was his character that tripped if he could be able to record this. He had mentioned that either he or one of his friends would be able to do this for him and then I just sent in some general suggestions of what this could sound like.
NEW PREVIS- OR NOT
So I had mentioned the idea of redoing our previs, just by editing what we had in the Blender file so we could get our frame timings down and such but when I brought this up to Tori she had said that this wasn’t a necessary thing that we should focus on, since we can just use what we have and adjust the timings in iMovie like I had been doing already. As you have seen before I did go through my part and adjusted some of the cameras to see how well that would feel compared to the original and I went and did this just one last time to see how it would look as well as editing some of the other members camera work. Some of the movements in this are in the nicest terms quite fucked, i have no idea how this happened but since i was just quickly going over these I didn’t want to dedicate a lengthy amount of time to smooth these out.
For this shot, I think having them look around the room a bit more instead of showing them walking in is more important to the story, as well as having a closer camera.
For the POV shot, I thought adding some side to side movement (and eventually some camera shake) could work well to show it is actually a POV shot would do good.
I just took these and edited them into the sound pass that I liked the best, to see what it would look like and now I will just send it to my group to see their thoughts. The only thing we are missing from this is our credits scene, but it isn’t something too complicated so we can leave it to see if we have time left over and do it then!
Overall, this has been a very stressful assignment, and I find myself getting really overwhelmed with how much work we seem to have but I am just going to try my best and see how I get on in the coming weeks.