Project 2 - Finalization

During the 2 1/2 post production days, I wasn't satisfied with the second scene because there are a lot of set-backs within the actual footage. One of it was, Caleb (the first guy getting killed) going with the other girl (Rachel). When I took it, it was really shaky because they were walking too fast, and I try to catch up with them. I wanted to have a more detailed shot by taking them a picture in a cafe or holding hands together in a park. The problem is we can't manage to shoot anymore with them together because of their own personal schedule. The solution I made is just to make a montage of pictures from the footage that I took and make it like a targeting point. I imagine on how would a wolf attack on a person, so I manipulate the snapshot in Photoshop and make a zoom blur to the picture except to the two of them. The pictures that I made interprets the girl that she's stalking at their back and about to pounce soon. It was quite effective and decided to put it in the video. 

I talk about, in the last blog, having a problem from rendering videos because of the file size is too big. It's because I often make some layers of colours in After Effects and exporting as QuickTime .mov. I ask Gabriel about my problem and he told me that exporting in H.264 would be the solution. Even it has many plug-ins on it, it will compress it to a smaller size and still runs smoothly in any video player. Added to that, Gabriel thought me a super-effective way of putting effects and stuff to one shot even without going in and out of Premiere Pro and After Effects. All I have to do is just right click the footage on the edit, and click replace composition to After Effects. My work got easy and I crank up working on the colours and transition. I worked on two laptops (Chris and Sam's) so that I wouldn't get behind schedule which I would thought. As I imagined the rendering takes ages. Took me 4 hours to render one scene. As productive person as I am, I did the other scene to the other laptop so that it would be a less work on the next day. I took Sam's laptop at home and work on the ending scene. I prefer working on Sam's laptop, it's because the speculation of the computer is better than my own computer. After rendering the ending scene I started choosing my audio.

What I did for my audio is that I wanted to get an dark mood atmosphere on the start. Referring to the last blog, I already made a preview of our film and chosen some of the audio that will quite fit well. In this case, I hadn't got much trouble finding some audio for the opening scene. I have my stock audios on my hard drive which I got from videocopilot. I bought Pro Scores last year when I was doing some of my own animation back in the days. I searched in my resource for dramatic sounds as well for the scenes where the story in diary comes in. The sound editing took me half of the day since I already visualize on what am I going to put. Chris recorded her narrating sound the day before I did the sound editing. I also recorded a little bit for extra sound effects with my voice, but I change the pitch and added some echo on it. To the last minute I went on doing the credits. I already started it when I was at home and even my group didn't know what's going to happen on the end. They were just surprised on what I did. It was really awesome. I put the animation of the blood with the title and timing it when the girl hits the guy with the brick. It's was the highlight of the film.