First Major Project - Post production retrospective.

this will be split into four parts, Planning, rough cut, fine cut, and F/X. I will explain what I did and how I did it.


Trail Panning

I started by drawing out a fairly basic plan of what I wanted show in the trailer, a mixture of a scene list and a storyboard, this became a step outline which eventually became my rough cut, during the step outline stage things changed a lot, i kept making revisions and changes even before putting it together.


Rough cut
editing the rough cut was fairly easy, i started by making myself a basic EDL, i went through each shot and labeled it either Gd or Bd, good or bad, then I imported the whole lot into Premier Pro.
I worked from my plan until i had a very rough sequence, I then went in and tidied the cuts up and isolated the shots which required FX additions, these I exported as MP4's so that Hitfilm 3 Express could access them.

Fine Cut
after having shown Simon my rough cut I went back out to do my reshoot, after my reshoot I followed a similar set of actions as for my rough, I went through and labeled each shot as either good or bad, before exploring how to integrate them into my existing sequence, this took several hours as at every point I felt that it didn't quite make the cut, eventually I found a sequence I liked, I integrated my FX shots and then started on fixing the sound, unfortunately a lot of my shots had audio noise of one form or another, some far worse than others, after that I exported the whole thing in its native MPEG 2 video, I then opened a new project and imported the sequence, I did this to save time during colour correction, I colour corrected everything and then set about re-framing my shots to exclude the dead rabbit(Wind sock) that snuck into the top right hand corner of my shots.

F/X

producing the Fx shots qwas one of the easiest and most annoying parts of post, I used two different programs, Hitfilm3 Express and Adobe After Effects. I used Hit film on the Alien fatial markings for the MIa character, and After effects for the explosive flash of light.

step by step,
I mocapped Nora's(Mia Maddeline's) face by way of her eyebrows and the corners of her mouth, this allowed me to mount the shape layer that was her facial makings to her face and have them move with it.-I used a single resource to remind me how to do this in Hit film.(LINK) I basically followed this process, once for each side of her face, to allow for her fatial movement as-well as head movements.

my other FX shot was the flash of light, I did this entirely in after effects and it shows how much more practice i need in that program, After effects is worse at motion tracking when compared to hit film, Period. so it looks rather bad in comparison to my other FX shot, unfortunately hit film express cannot generate lens flare, which is the effect process I used.