Final Cut Edit

Here you can see after we'd laid out our final cut visuals we went on to colour correcting some of the shots. It was only a handful of shots that needed this done to them, but those that did proved to be quite a problem. The main problem was that for the opening split screen shot of the title, since we had 3 shots of it we cut to and from and they all looked quite drastically different. I managed to change one to match another but the one screenshotted on the right, below was impossible to match because it is such a warm image and everything I did even messing with the levels meant that if one colour got closer it ruined the rest of the image. Begrudgingly we had to leave it, 2 fitted relatively well but the warm image was impossible to match up visually. This problem was probably because we had to set up all these shots very quickly as we didn't want to waste anyone's time in the workshop, as a result the 3 cameras would all have been filming on different settings. Normally everyone checked their cameras were the same, but we didn't have time here.

Here I tried to make it colder to
fit visually with the next shot. You can
see here I did this by playing with
the levels on fcp.

Using the 3 way colour corrector wheels to try and
pull out the green tones from this shot.

The shot it cuts too is a lot warmer,
and looks very different

The much brighter shot of the
title

We decided not to keep the split screen going or bring it back in again because it would have felt like a strange motif that we weren't quite sticking with, it would feel like a half done idea. I like it in the way it just throws you into the film with a lot of movement straight away, and gets you immediately involved, but we didn't think it would work again after we get into the story a bit more.

Also after messing around with colours we also darkened the below image to silhouette the graffiti writer. As per all the films I've seen researching this project pretty much all the graffiti documentaries feature people doing actual graffiti, it's an essential element. Despite not having much footage of that nature we tried to make this one really stand out by bringing out the colours in the foreground and silhouetting the person by darkening the dark textures and upping the contrast, I think it looks really good and people that have viewed the film have commented on it showing I think we achieved what we wanted.

Here is one of the examples where I actually zoomed in on an image to fill the entire frame with colour. I essentially cropped out the ends so we focus on a more select section to show how the wall is completely engrossed with colour. We all agreed that colour is one of the best things about our documentary and this kind of tracking shot filling every part of the frame with vibrant colour looks really nice.

The below screenshot is my attempt at following Lee's advice about putting little things in to make it not seem like it was just formal rigid interviews. Phillip here looks directly down the camera for a brief second, but it's still noticeable and I think works in the way Lee was trying to explain, albeit in quite a minor way. I felt like this is something I should have done more, but the interview clips I used didn't really have too much like this within them so putting it in would have been ruined the structure we established, but I tried where I could.

The new ending to the film is much more light hearted and intended to make people laugh, so for this we decided to just hold the interview on screen for a longer time, the longest we leave anyone on screen in the film. This doesn't matter though because even if it begins to outstay its welcome it ends quite unexpected and funny, it gives a bit of relief from what could maybe be seen as a the film preaching the positives of street art a bit too much. What I regret doing is the cut to black right after that, it feels too harsh in my eyes and I wish I'd experimented with how to end it more. I kept it as a cut because the rest of our transitions were just cuts, as I wanted to go for a sort of raw seeming cut structure, dissolves and fades/wipes looked awful when I tried them out early in the edit. I was more for keeping transitions consistent throughout the film, as whenever I strayed from that idea I couldn't get them to work and look good.

The held end shot before cutting to black and then the credits.

Similar to moving images I had never put on name titles on a film before, so I had to do some research as to how to do it. It was much simpler than I expected, pretty much the same as adding a credit screen, but removing the background. To fit with the street idea going throughout the piece I downloaded the font Patinio Graffiti from the internet and used that, the only problem being that some people might not be able to read it, but of all the ones we came across we thought this would be the best one.
I also taught myself to make the background to the text since alone it didn't look very good and seemed out of place when it was just alone. I did it by adding a black screen in to the scene, changing it's opacity to about 60% so you could still see through it. I then cropped it and moved it using the 'centre point' to cover the text, then finally to make the text stand out more I upped the contrast on it for it to be as clear as possible to give people the best chance to read it and potentially get over that problem.

Adding the text to the image and getting it nicely
in the corner so its visually pleasing and not
blocking the subject.

Here you can see me resizing
the rectangle to fit around the
text, and feathering the edge
so it's not so harsh.

The same font used in the quotes
for visual symmetry throughout
the piece.

The good effect of the finalised
text with background.

The final cut structure without the soundtrack on. The silent bit at the start is where Oli's soundtrack will run
most prominently then he'll lower the levels throughout the interviews, kicking it back in in the gaps.

'Street Art Documentary' Analysis

I thought for a bit of variety of the films I've looked at for this project I would find a film similar to the one we're making in terms of it being an amateur film and being a similar length to our restrictions. Street Art Documentary (2006) directed by James Ashbolt is 10 mins long and is a film by an amateur trying to convey the street art scene of Melbourne.

The people they follow at night to see how they do graffiti secretly

One of the main things it focusses on visually is the fact that the film-maker actually went out with some people and filmed them as they did some graffiti. There is multiple scenes of actual street artists doing work and it works very well within the film. This sadly is something we don't have tons of for our film and is something that if we were to go back to Liverpool we'd need to focus on getting more. In this film the camera follows them handheld and it feels very raw and honest, something we want in our doc and comes across well here.

One of the bits of footage of an artist doing his stencil work

One criticism is that there aren't many city shots within the film and since in the Vimeo description it describes it as being 'about the Melbourne street art scene' it feels at time it lacks a sense of place. Some of the sound levels seem a bit off too, sometimes the backing music overshadows what the person on screen is saying. Furthermore in one of the interviews a lot of the background noise gets picked up so it's not the easiest thing to hear.

Quite a strange profile interview set up, shows the workshop surroundings very well though

What's very nice about the piece is that it talks to a wide array of people, some young, some older and interestingly a chiropractor who does street art in his spare time reflects on how his patients view it and how other street artists view him knowing what he is. It makes for an interesting story and shows a side I haven't seen touched on before.

The hidden identity interview approach of this film

It's nice seeing that the aspects from the professional films are replicated in this amateur film too, it shows there is quite an established way of making these films. It's also quite nice that our rough cut was similar in many ways to all these films but yet different at the same point, we use a lot of things like split screen that I haven't seen anywhere else.

My notes watching the film.

Edit Plan 2

After the tutorial we all decided to go to the edit suite and all listen to all the interviews and then we each chose our favourite quotes from the interviews. We then compiled a list of all the best quotes, and discussed which ones could work well. This way of choosing a narrative involved the team much more and was a much better idea than me and Noah choosing like our rough cut.

After we'd heard everyone's opinions me, Oli and Noah discussed what would work best as actual interviews and what would work as sound bites for the intro and built up a new narrative that way. With collaborative input from the whole group we were able to create a much better narrative I think, and our new shot sequence was a much better and more comprehensive cut of the interviews.

This new story felt like it gave it more of a story, the shots linked into one another well and everyone agreed it seemed to flow better than the first one. I also put forward the idea of changing the end to a very light hearted note. Tristan in one of his interviews mentions how they expect new street art to be amazing and how everyone will love it but it could just have some boobies drawn on it so they'll have a laugh. I felt like this was a great quote to end on because it's unexpected so the childish comedy of it comes across well while it still mentions the problem of graffiti covering other graffiti. This light-hearted end is the kind of thing I think Lee mentioned with the looks down camera etc; we took it a bit further but for the piece I think it ends it in a memorable and positive way.

This is the sheet with all the interviews best quotes on, numbered and ticked off the ones we are going to use in the actual edit.

The other side of the quote shit covering the remaining interviews.

Here are the finalised edit notes, basically just the numbers in order

Tutorial With Lee

We had our meeting with Lee about how our work is so far. He was quite impressed with what we'd done, but thought the narrative could have done with some work. Also by this point he hadn't synced our sound up to the image in FCP so the interviews didn't sound too crisp. The soundtrack also hadn't been put in at this point so we showed it to him separately he equally liked it at the point it was at.

After telling him about our Catherine situation, about not wanting to include her so as to not clutter the film and how what she says isn't too relevant, but feeling like we should to advertise her company. He said to make the film the best it could be, and not to pander to Catherine just because of her help to get it shown, instead make the film we want to make, but be respectful at the same time.

Another thing he told us to do is to look out for the subtle things in the interview that make it seem more informal, for example when they finish a sentence and relax for a bit, and could look into the camera by accident. These informal elements are something I think we should definitely try to put in our doc to try and give it less of a promotional and rigid standard documentary feel.

Rough Cut Edit

Me and Noah came up with a structure for which clips to use where which we did off the list of who covered which points on the edit plan. It took quite a while to get all the clips in the order we wanted, but that was just trial and error, we wanted to get the story of the clips laid out before we dealt with any of the visuals. I also made sure the clips weren't too long, referencing back to the timings I did when watching Getting Up since I thought that style fitted the kinetic desire of the film more so than the long take technique Urbanbugs took on. 

First thing we did was get the clips laid out in story order

We wanted to use the title that we got Zener to spray paint for us, the problem was that the shot was about 30 secs long, which is far too long and dull to have in the film. We got around this by opening with a split screen with graffiti shots montaging next to Zener doing our title on the right, we also cut that to one of the cutaways of it from another angle. By having both screens moving we have a lot of movement on screen so it feels like it starts off not so much energetic but with enough movement to engage audiences since their eyes will immediately be flitting to the different screens and they'll constantly be looking at the changing screens on both sides.

I used markers on FCP to line up the
title cuts so it cut at the same point
and flowed.

Here you can just see the layered
tracks and how the effect worked

Something else I've talked about and looked at is how a lot of the documentaries pan over still images to mix it up a bit from standard video ways of showing things. This is something I'd never tried before on FCP so I had to do a bit of research into how to do it. I found a webpage that explained it to me (https://documentation.apple.com/en/finalcutpro/usermanual/index.html#chapter=70%26section=15%26tasks=true)  I found out it's about key frames and having your start point and end point at the different places on the photo and then it will do the movement from one to the other for you. So after that it was a matter of trial and error to get the best pan for the image and to make sure it covers the best parts of the photo.
The people we interviewed from Urban Canvas sent us a couple of their stock images of their street art, so the fact I can now do this technique is good to help emphasise their work. For example in one of the interviews Phillip from UC is talking about community participation so in the edit I zoom out from just the image of the people working together to show the whole large thing they're working on .This way the visuals support what the interviewee is saying is something I've tried to incorporate to the whole rough cut.

Here you can see how I've made
it move by making keyframes

On this you can see the movement
of the photo from the tilted green
line.

In the below screenshot you can see we had to speed up some of the shots since they went on for so long, and in some cases I reversed them because I thought it worked better the other way. The problems I faced was that when it was made too fast it just looked ridiculous and cartoon-y, so it was a fine line making the movements seem natural but fast enough to fit in a gap without overstaying its welcome on the screen.

One of the problems I came across is that we don't actually have as much usable footage as I first thought, especially not of Liverpool as a city, as I said in my Liv Day 3 post the shots we do have of the city have big logos and copyrighted brand names in it so wouldn't be usable. There is just enough to get away with for this film but it's still not the ideal amount, or indeed the amount I thought we were all getting when we were there (i was with a camera too so im not excluding myself from that).

Throughout the edit the other members of the team kept coming in to look at the edit and give advice as to how to improve it etc. It's good that our team has worked well together throughout the whole project so much, we don't meet every day anymore but everyone is interested in how the edit is going and willing to help and we all stay in contact over a Facebook conversation.

Edit Structure

Noted from our discussion

When me and Noah met to discuss the edit structure for the rough cut we initially broke what interviews we had down into 5 sections that we wanted to cover. 1)The community 2)Info about street art 3)The interviewees companies 4)Why it should be celebrated 5)Where's it going in the future. We felt that a minute on each of these points would both get a good story across and at the same time cover everything that we thought was important to cover, giving a full picture.

We then compiled a list of which interviewee best covers this subject in their interview. This lead us to realise Tristan is the most comprehensive of all of the people we talked to and indeed the most charismatic, something I know I need to focus on after watching the docs I watched as research into how to edit this film. As a result focussing on him as almost a main character would be a good idea in the film, as he gets across his point entertainingly and informatively.

After a bit of thought we scrapped the idea of putting companies in it, since we thought people promoting themselves doesn't actually get across a lot more than just seeming a bit like an advert for their company. The only problem is that that was the opening question and how they introduced themselves, therefore we won't have them introducing themselves, but we thought this is a problem we can deal with. We asked about their company first so that it's something they'd expect and know so would be able to start talking freely and become more relaxed.

To make up for only having 4 minutes of interviews we're going to have the opening minute a montage of graffiti and Liverpool with Oli's soundtrack to act as a sort of intro section to the film. This is something that both the graffiti films I've already looked at did, so it's a good idea to go with, since it's been tried and tested as successful in them.

It's also key that it ends on a positive note, since we're making a celebration of street art instead of a debate. As the credits roll we want people to have a very positive view of street art, this is vital to the film working, and if they don't have that I'll feel like we failed with what we were trying to portray.

Analysis of Footage

One of the dolly shots zooming in on
this piece

Up close images of the graffiti

Examples of Tomo's work to go over when
he's talking

The first thing I noticed when I organised and looked over all the footage was that we didn't have the footage to make the documentary we originally wanted to make. To go for the gritty 'urban' idea we were planning on going with a lot of high energy handheld shots, instead we came out with a much more formal documentary, with a lot of pull focuses, zooms etc. This isn't a bad thing per say it just means that we have to re-plan how the film will work.

Keeping the frame colourful and engaging

The most similar to the look we were originally going for was Noah's footage which he shot with a dropped frame rate, since it came across juddery and very energetic with every movement.

One of the shots of the city

We took a lot of dolly shots while we were on location and we could tell some of them were going to be shaky as we shot them due to the ground we were on. However after watching them back there was actually very few perfect ones, meaning we would have to run them through the Smoothcam plugin on Final Cup Pro, which will help the image but not completely.


The interviews came out very well, the main problem coming from the ones with the people from Urban Canvas, this is because behind the camera was a big window and it was an overcast day so it gets brighter and darker as the sun went behind clouds etc. This isn't the biggest problem in the world as the lighting stays the same long enough to establish who it is before we can cutaway to hide the changing image.

Shot of person doing graffiti as seems key
in the docs I watched

Our other problem with Urban Canvas was that Catherine's interview in it isn't actually that good and instead of talking about street art as a whole (as we were intending to focus on) she talks a lot about her company. Normally we could just cut it out, however in this case it's a problem because she offered us an opportunity to get our film screened at an international festival of business, so since she got us that chance we think we should represent her more in the film.
Here are screenshots form each of our interview set ups showing our array of different colourful backgrounds:

Tomo

Urban Canvas- Catherine

Kieron

Tristan

Ryan

Helpfully Alex K did shot lists for all the shots he did too this as well as my own folders will help me find what I need in the edit much faster.

Screenshot of the shot list

Screenshot of the interview shot list

'Getting Up' Analysis

The title screen, showing the urban environment it's about

 This documentary seems to share a lot of the aspects that Noah wanted as director from our project when we first started discussing how it's going to look and be put together. The main aspect that we wanted to copy was the kinetic and energetic 'urban' style. Right from the outset of the doc there is street music playing, quick cuts, handheld shots and everything else to immediately establish its self as an urban film.

The use of night time footage used in the film to highlight the secret
rebellious side to it

As you can see from the photos below I timed the amount of time that the interviewees were actually on screen to get an idea of how long to hold our until we use cutaways to break it up. The average screen time was actually much lower than I expected, the talking heads of the people interviewed were only on for on average about 5 secs before it cut to montage. The interview clips themselves averaged out at about 16 secs until they cut to the next one.

People with faces covered to cover identity shows respect
for the interviewees

The way they used the cut up interviews to create a narrative and a full story of the graffiti scene in their location, which interestingly was never actually said specifically, I think it is meant to represent the graffiti culture in general. But nonetheless expressing the story through all the different interviews chopped and changed is something we will definitely be using in our film, and you can see how it is used well in this doc, we get a rounded view of everything from a select group of people and it never sticks on one person too long to get boring.

Colourful use of the interviewed artists actual work to help
advertise them as well as have them help the doc.

This kind of style of story telling is I think the one I'll use for our film, fairly quick cuts from one person to another so that you get people talking about the same point and supporting each other. I think this will give a much more rounded view to the doc and not seem like it's just one person being positive about the subject.

The name bar follows the same theme as the title page to
give the doc visual symmetry throughout.

It is also helped by the fact it has a lot of very interesting characters that are extremely charismatic and passionate about graffiti. This is something essential I think with both this documentary and documentaries in general, and is something we have for our film. The use of them all here and how they keep the doc engaging has emphasised to me that I'll have to exploit the characters we have in our film to get the most response and engagement from the audience.

Features footage of actual graffiti being done
on the streets

The balance of still photos to actual moving shots is good and the editing of the stills is still very energetic so they feel like they have movement to them. This is very much something I'll need to teach myself to do in our documentary, because using photos to good effect is something key to documentaries in my eyes and something I want to utilise in our film.

This shot with the harsh shadow feels almost like
a portrait of the graffiti artist in his natural area.

I don't personally like how it cuts to a quote on the over contrast before they begin to talk about the quote that has just been put up. I feel slightly like it was the best way they could come up with showing people what they're going to be talking about without using a voice-over. It works in the way that it would be a lot worse with v/o and it does help explain what they'll be talking about next, but I still find it breaks up the flow of the film a bit too much.

An example of the visual symmetry being used to effect and the
use of quotes to guide the viewer.

The rough length of clips if interviews, for
a section of the film

The notes I took watching the film

Amount of time talking heads are on screen on average,
again for a section of the film

*Despite looking I could not find the name of the director to give credit to him/her but it was uploaded by Ink & Instinct to Vimeo at the address:  http://vimeo.com/11392175