Friends, readers, countrymen, I have begun the editing/post-production process for Unpacking. Admittedly, this was something I was a little terrified of; I don't have much experience with editing. In fact, aside from a fever-dream project in the seventh grade for Civics class, of which I only remember snatches and flashes, and a TikTok video I filmed for this course, I had never edited a video, or anything visually narrative. But I buckled down and started it- and that's the hardest part, right? Right?
To begin with, there were some things I put in place during production to make my life easier during post-production. I organized all my footage (shot on my iPhone 12) on my iCloud Photos account, in two separate albums for the two halves of production- day 1 and days 2/3- and stored everything in labeled folders in my Google Drive, within my Portfolio Project folder.
Where needed, I also downloaded photos and videos onto either my laptop, or either of my partner's laptops, both of which I sometimes use. However, I tried to stay away from only having a hard copy of my footage on one computer. Not only was I afraid of any kind of malfunction leading to me losing all my hard work from shooting, I also like to be able to work anywhere I am with whatever equipment I have with me. Since my laptop is old, loud, overheats easily, and doesn't fit in my backpack, I tend to be very spotty with what computer I use; I often use school laptops from whatever teacher's classroom I'm in, or my partner's computers. Also, after downloading and labeling all of my day 1 footage in an early attempt at editing, I aborted the process. I tend to take long videos- not moving or cutting the camera feed between takes- because of inexperience, both my own and that of my crew. After trying to edit clips on Premiere Pro, I quickly backed out of the process altogether; here, you can see the thought process and research that led me to iMovie.
Having set myself up for success (hopefully), I began roughly cutting individual takes out of each longer video file using the iCloud Photos tools. This was a really laborious process, and it was easy to miss whether I'd already cut out a particular take. In the future, to make this easier, I want to use an industry-style clapperboard (if I can) to label my footage. I then watched all the different takes for each scene, decided on elements of my favorites, and roughly put them in order on the iMovie timeline. At this point, I was worried about going overtime; I think once I had all the clips uploaded, I was at nearly 5 minutes. But I knew that there was a lot of downtime to be cut out. Still, I think planning each shot more intensely before shooting and following a more organized approach to takes would have reduced the uncertainty I had.
I also ran into another problem at this juncture: the zoom effect I'd intended to use for the very first shot, the Ken Burns effect, wasn't available on iMovie for videos; only photos. It also wasn't available on Premiere Rush for videos. I'll tell you how I got over this after day 2 of editing is up; but- hint- I may have to brave Premiere Pro after all. But I only discovered this (in my opinion, rather serious) defect of Premiere Rush (a shame, I really liked the simplicity of the interface) after day 1, with my future-Clover brain. Let's finish chronicling what I did in editing.
My biggest challenge was the credits. I had to speed up and slow down the pacing of the credits a lot to make sure the timing of the reveals was consistent as the boxes panned; I also had to cut out a lot of transition time. In the future, it would've been helpful to film with a more standardized credit length in mind- and my musician's brain can't help but think I should've used a metronome. I also completely zoomed in and out on a lot of shots, especially those of me and Bia taking out our individual actor credits from the trunk. I did this for two reasons: it made those shots more cohesive with the rest of the credits, and it also prevented an early reveal of credits that weren't supposed to be as in the frame. Although it made it kind of grainy, I think I might try to add a similar grain effect on the rest of the credits to pull it together.
Day 1 was definitely not the end; after reviewing that first cut with Bia's eyes to help me, I realize there were some rough patches on the transition at the stairs and the walking into the bedroom scene, as well as a real need for a zoom-in on the bedroom scene so that I could successfully pull off the shot/countershot with our earlier footage. Also, there was lots of static on most of the audio recorded in the entryway of my home and the car, because of (respectively) the hard-surface-high-ceiling combination and the running engine before Bia turns it off. I'm definitely excited to continue with Day 2 of editing, and as soon as I'm done, I'll see you on the flip side.
Yours always,
Clover Fields
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