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.