Exposure (the new title of our group project) Post-Production

Exposure

Post-Production

We've changed the title 'So It Goes', since this title went with our first idea of having a storyline that ended in despair and resignation, a completely different theme from the storyline we finally decided on. We wanted a title that was more appropriate to go with the themes of photography that is seen throughout the film and also had relevance to the storyline and theme of hope. After many different ideas, we decided to use the title 'Exposure' since it is a photography term used mainly in the darkroom, which part of our film takes place in, and is also a play on words, highlighting the theme of her being exposed for who she really is.

After filming all the footage over a 3-day period, Ant took the footage to log and capture it and create a rough edit for us to work with. James, Ant and I decided to meet up to do the post-production and editing together. We decided to do this instead of each taking separate bits and editing them in our own way because we thought we all would have different styles of editing and it would have been hard to put them together to make a uniform piece. We still all wanted to contribute to the editing process, so we met up at Ant's flat as he has an iMac desktop with Final Cut Pro, which is the program we chose to do the editing on.


We had to make some changes, such as cutting out footage of a scene
which took place in and near a tunnel in Bristol (seen right) since, although the aesthetic quality of the footage and the style of it made it some of the best footage we had, the location didn't make sense as we had no reason in the story for her to suddenly be in a tunnel in the middle of nowhere (it was a 2 mile walk from James' house in the middle of a forest) when she had previously been walking in the city of Bath. Because of this, in the interest of keeping the story realistic, unfortunately we had to cut the scene altogether.

The tunnel in Bristol

After finishing the editing, we then used Soundtrack Pro to create sound effects and to add the music, one of the most important aspects of the film. We learned from doing a sound effect task before about using diagetic and non-diagetic sounds. We used diagetic sounds ('actual' sounds, ones that match with what is seen on screen) such as a city background from Soundtrack since when we filmed the exterior shots of walking down the streets of Bath, there were aspects from the real sound that distracted from the fim, such as cars being too loud, honking and people talking in the background. We decided to do this so that we could have more control over what was heard and when. We also added a non-diagetic (or non-realistic sounds to create dramatic effect) sound that we used throughout the film every time the protoganist had a flashback to make it more dramatic, as well as an underwater sound we found on on soundtrack to create the effect of it being muffled and distorted during the flashback sequences.

Then it was time to add the music. We decided to use songs from the albums The Slip and Ghosts I - IV by the band Nine Inch Nails, both of which are released under Creative Commons copyright license which makes it free to use as long as we credit the band in the final piece. These are instrumental tracks with a subdued and ethereal quality (Lead singer Trent Reznor calls the album 'a soundtrack for daydreams'), which is the exact type of music we were looking for that we thought would fit best with the dream-like aesthetic elements of film.


After we had done all this and had done some final tweaks, we were finished with post-production! I think we did well on the timing and schedule of production, finishing it well ahead of the deadline and having enough time to really focus on editing it to the best of our ability. We are all happy with the final result and can say that overall this was a great experience.

Exposure final result coming soon!