20. april 23-27

Thursday, April 23rd
Today, I spent my class time between helping LokLok with her film and editing mine. We both have the same problem, so it was easy for us to help each other – both our videos were way too long, and while cutting parts out had already shortened our videos considerably, it was still about a minute long, twice as much time as we were allowed. I definitely could not afford to cut anything more; my video has been cut so much that some parts of it doesn’t flow and make sense anymore. The other option was speeding it up, which we did. After speeding up almost every clip by 120, LokLok appears to be moving at super human speed and looks very odd, but I think that with the help of background music, that could be made to look intentional. Another problem with mine was the lighting. When filming the scene of LokLok crawling out from under the table and stealing the CD, I had decided to leave the lights off because it was supposed to be a night time scene, and it would also help enhance the dark mood of the video – too dark, I realized, when I watched it on Final Cut. I had noticed this for some time now, but today, because all our clips were sequenced, I actually had time to do something about it. I went to effects, and dragged in the ‘Brightness and Contrast’ effect, hoping to make LokLok’s actions easier to see. However, I realized that brightening it or adding contrast made the image quite grainy. I had to choose between brightness and image quality. In the end I decided on brightness. The graininess makes the scene look like it was captured on a security camera, and adds to the secretive effect (LokLok isn’t supposed to steal the CD). This was not really the effect I was going for, because now the image is not as clear as I had hoped for, but it is an improvement over the darkness.

Friday, April 24th
Today, LokLok and I stayed after school to work on our clips. Staying after school, when fewer people are around, allowed us to work individually on separate computers, and we got a lot more done because of that. I still have lots of speeding up of clips to do. I found that 3 of the clips at the beginning of my video that could not speed up – a problem that confused even Mr. Chang. In the end, I learned what happened and what to do: the clip had somehow disappeared from the video timeline, and I could not speed up a clip that was not there. What I had to do was: double-click on the clip, press ‘F’, place the playhead over the clip, press Apple J, speed it up, and then overwrite the original. I also put in the background music, narration and sound effects that were missing last class today. It really is amazing how much difference it makes. The narration made the clips, which until today seemed like a bunch of random clips thrown together, a story that actually flowed and made sense. The background music created a dark atmosphere for the video that was not there before, no matter how much I edited the lighting, and made me seem tired from working in the beginning scene despite the fact that I was almost smiling. However, I encountered a few problems with the sound effects. During the scene of me looking at my watch, I had originally planned to use a manual watch, but had decided to use a digital watch in the end to indicate the modern setting, as well as enable myself to use a beeping sound, similar to a time bomb ticking, which would signal the ‘danger’ ahead. However, I realized I did not have anything that made such a beeping sound, so I had to use the sound of the manual watch after all, which doesn’t really make sense since I am clearly looking at a digital watch in the scene. However, I really like the footsteps sound effect, because the echoes make the scene seem dramatic. I am pretty much done with my video, and am ready to subtitle on Monday.

Monday, April 27
We spent today’s class subtitling our videos. Well, half, because I had to wait for LokLok first. I should have spent the waiting time translating my own script, but sadly it did not occur to me, and I had nothing to do but fill in the form for the first half of class, then spent the other half panicking about what to say in my subtitles. I also made the mistake of thinking that I could type first and sequence later. I did not realize that by dragging the ‘Text’ effect on top of another ‘Text’ clip, the do not both appear on screen together, as I had expected, but it instead cuts the ‘Text’ clip at the bottom. This meant that after I had done my subtitles, I found my video clips in a mess (good thing I had exported my video into one file at lunch, so that I did not have too many clips to handle) and most of my subtitles missing. I had to retype those subtitles and sequence them, which made me half an hour late in exporting my video and putting it in the drop box.