Our Final Sequence!

CCR Task 4: How did you integrate technologies - software, hardware and online in this project?

CCR Task 4 - Wix Website

CCR Task 3: How did your production skills develop throughout this project?

CCR Task 3 - Prezi

CCR Task 2: How does your product engage with audience and how would it be distributed as a real media text?

CCR TASK 2 - Piktochart

CCR Task 1: How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?

Final Editing Session

Today was our final editing session! Similar to other days, I went to the editing suite in my study period just before our class. I did this because I had an idea for another recut which was

a compromise between the original plan and the first recut. This was to have Hugo's eyeliner match play as if he was looking back and then playing the team talk as if it was a flashback to the motivational speech at half time. I felt a though this was a good idea because we really wanted the speech to run into the penalty and end perfectly on time with the ball and the first recut where we shifted the team talk to the middle of the sequence made that not possible without it feeling out of place. Additionally, Tom, our technical advisor, sat with me and we thought that making the colours more crisp and increasing the contrast on the football section of the sequence made for greater contrast and made the football have more visual impact. 

Once the group came in for our lesson, we all agreed that the recut I had just done was the best and a good compromise out of the 3, making it an easy decision after watching each of them. This meant we were ready to add the soundtrack. Carl imported it into Premiere Pro and immediately it had a considerable effect and brought our sequence to life. Because we had chosen the recut as opposed to the original cut that Carl had been mixing against, we had a few minor changes to make and we decided to do these on the visuals rather than the sound. Firstly we had to make sure the coach's speech (Remy) fell exactly in line with the music for it to fade out and have a strong impact second before the kick. Not only did we have to make sure the sound lined up with the ending, we had to ensure that it was synced with the visuals. Subsequently, we went through the sequence with the soundtrack on mute, locking it in place, and adjusting the volume of some shot, heightening the birds chirping in the opening and the sideline reaction after the penalty while decreasing the db on shots of the coach shouting. We then noticed that Hugo placed the ball down twice in the edit which needed changing for continuity purposes, this was easily solved and a minor change. 

While getting it signed off by Adam, our teacher, he noticed that our titles were in the wrong order, something we hadn't noticed after changing around shots (with titles on them). This was easily fixed, however, there was a power cut just as we began this - meaning we had lost the last 15 minutes of tedious work. We were able to quickly recover and finish our sequence by moving the titles into the correct order. Lesson learnt... save as often a possible. 

I am proud of our final sequence and, in my opinion, the sound really injects atmosphere and life into the sequence. I feel that we worked well as a group to get to this point and I think we executed our initial idea to the best of our ability with the skills and time we were allocated :)

Finalising The Edit and Titles - Fifth Editing Session

As today was our penultamate editing session it was important that we began finalising our sequence. I went in my free period prior to our lesson to finish the titles as it is quite a laborious task to do, especially in a group setting, however, I was happy to do it as it gave me something to concentrate myself on. I began finishing the titles Freddie had started in the previous session but once I had finished Tom, our technical supervisor, had pointed out slight differences in each title. We then realised it was because we had been changing the aspect of each title rather than the font size itself, this ultimately made each ones slightly different and can make our sequence look far more amateur. In order to fix this I took a photo of the aspects/ size and other information of the first title and re-sized each title. Then, in the main editing session we all gave our opinions on the sequence and made slight adjustments to it while Carl continued developing the soundtrack, such as cutting the final shot sooner so it was unclear whether the ball would go in the goal or not. Using photoshop, we created our title card as it meant we were able to continue using the same font but change the 'o' in 'Man On' to a football.

We then got to a point where we were close to being finished when Adam mentioned how the sequence appeared to be chronological and then changed to non-linear towards the end. In reality, it was meant to be a montage of a game and a flashback to the motivational speech given at half time by the coach to increase tensions before the penalty. As we had the time, we thought we may as well explore changing it so the speech comes in a 'real' halftime rather than as a flashback. In order to do this we duplicated the sequence to do a recut to compare the two. However, we are unsure how or when this happened but the recut was deleted and we had shifted around the shots in the actual sequence. While this wasn't detrimental as we still have another editing session to fix it, it made it difficult to compare the two, meant we had lost our original progress and would've messed with Carl's sound as it may of not come out identical to the copy he is mixing the sound against. Luckily, the technical team were able to help use recover the original from previous saves and meant we could keep both. While we haven't had time to fully discuss it, and left it for use to think about which we preferred, I feel was though the original might be the better option as the speech really adds an element of atmosphere and tension that would be diminished if it wasn't underscoring the preparation for the penalty.