FINAL OPENING SEQUENCE FOR "Street Style"

FINALLY! ALL OF OUR VIDEO IS FINISHED! NOW YOU CAN VIEW IT HERE:


That's our final piece finished but we will be back with more posts about the process of making "Street Style" and our thoughts about it. For now, enjoy!

Editing Production Diary

When we finished filming, we collected all our footage together to start on post-production, This part of the making of the opening sequence required us to put together a rough cut, where we showed the general look of our opening, and then a final cut with all effects, sound, titles and more. This is a post outlining how we editing together all of the "Street Style"' opening.

Making the Rough Cut

We first started by importing all our footage into Premiere Pro. This included all the takes (including fail takes), all sound, and main music. From this, we watched back all the footage, naming it and organising into scenes, starting to choose the takes that could be used. Then came the long process of putting together everything in order on the timeline.

To organise the opening, we used the storyboard which we used to reference which shots and angles to use in all three scenes. This formed our basic timeline, and we chose to start with including all good takes on it of the scenes. We then layered them over each other so we could watch back each one and from this we chose the ones that were most fitting for a smooth scene. Once all the best footage was chosen, we arranged everything so it would flow according to the storyboard, added some music and basic titles and the basic rough cut was complete.

We wanted to make it so the rough cut focused on mapping out how eventually the final product will look so we chose to leave out colour corrections, effects, sound adjustment, titles which fitted the sequence and more visual aspects. The rough cut was put together to show to our target audience and get a sense of whether they underrated the story and if the pacing works. We at this stage already made a list of all the improvements we needed to work on after the rough cut viewing and we left it to our viewer audience to mention anything else we needed to work. Really, the rough cut was our footage in order, some music on top, and basic font to show placements of titles.


You can follow the link here to see the rough cut as well as look at the audience feedback viewing we conducted to get views on how to improve our final product: ROUGH CUT AUDIENCE FEEDBACK INTERVIEWS

Making the Final Cut

As soon as we had our class rough cut viewing, we got back into editing to finish our final product. Here is where we made use of our list of improvements to make to begin making the opening visual appealing and appropriate for story and genre. This is how we improved the rough cut(mostly in order):

• made some small tweaks in order of clips and speed of scenes to make it flow better
• got rid of "Working Title" leaving space to put our own institutional logo 
• cropped the footage from top and bottom to make it appear to have film-like format
• changed some of the transitions to be smoother between scenes of the bathroom and the alleyway
• added an adjustment layer where we worked on colour grading according to mood of the scene (blue/black tint in the beginning and more golden tint in the end)

• neutralised some of the alleyway footage colouring which was too orange/golden
• added sound effects throughout to match all motion that was on screen (footsteps, doors, water dripping etc)
• improved the music placement, removing music in the bathroom and removing dialogue in after the bathroom scene to the dance scene to make both parts have more impact
• changed levels of sound to make sure it was not too quite or too loud
• improved lighting in parts of the alleyway scene with the "lighting effects" feature in Premiere Pro

• added improvements to the security camera footage including grain and overlay of old-style tape recording with glitches to make it realistic
• added drama 'boom' sound effects to key parts of the opening such as shots of: the bag, the gang members, and Elle taking money out of the bag to highlight the importance of these reveals
• stabilised some of the footage which hadn't been shot on a tripod but should have been
• created an institutional logo for A Work In Progress into the sequence (a post on development of the logo can be found HERE)

• added lense flares to the dance scene to reflect a happier mood
• created moving titles in After Effects which split to reveal institutional information thoughout the opening in place of the previously still titles of the rough cut
• digitally created the title of the film "Street Style" and added it to the ending shot, masking it to create a graffiti style spray on animation in After Effects

• made final tweaks in sound and footage and exported to make the Final Cut!

After Post-Production was Finished

Having exported our final product, we were left to upload and continue working on all other portfolio content of documenting the process. 

One of the final task which we need to complete for this portfolio is an evaluation. This will be individual work completed on our personal blogs. Therefore, from now we will be working on this part of the portfolio.