Editing Feedback - For the Love of God - Bar Scene

thisisapocalypse

thisisapocalypse

Well-known member
Hi everyone, I posted an earlier cut of this scene a little while back. I'm still very much learning how to edit (this is my first full length project), and would love feedback on the cutting. I know this will not be the final cut of the scene, but it's getting closer to what I'm after. I'm putting up the old cut of this as well for comparison.

Password for both clips: "dragons"

New Cut:

(note this cut does not have the explosion sound effects yet - but the timing of them would be the same as in the old cut).



Old Cut:



Feedback on old vs. new cut would be very much appreciated! Also, as I mentioned, I'm completely new to editing, so anyone who would be interested in seeing more cuts as I go, please PM me as I won't be able to post much more to these forums since we're going to make a go at festivals. I'd be happy to share with a few people who don't mind taking the time to help me get better at editing as I go along!

We're halfway through production now - and we'll be finished by the end of the year. It's a massive project, a 200pg script - it will definitely be cut down in editing but it will be about Pulp Fiction length/pacing and it's 2 stories that run in parallel.

I've written, am directing and running camera on this project - so feedback on any of these areas is also welcome. More than likely I will be finding an editor to collaborate with as I simply can't do everything myself and I know I will need help doing post-sound which I regard as the toughest and most critical aspect of post-production (along with picture lock).

What I'm concentrating on now is completing production and then getting a good feel for scene editing so that I tell the story right and then we hit everything else.

Tech:

Shooting on GH13. Transcoded to Cineform. Cut in Edius. CC in After Effects. I'm finding the gamma in After Effects seems to be different than what Edius is seeing, it didn't appear nearly as crushed/dark in AE when I did the CC, but when I dropped the color-corrected files back into Edius they were quite a bit darker. Any tips on this would be helpful. I exported the un-color-corrected takes from Edius to Uncompressed YUUV files for AE, did the CC and then exported out of AE to uncompressed YUUV files and put them back into Edius. For Vimeo I uploaded a pretty compressed WMV file since what I'm really looking for right now is feedback on editing, not the look just yet (since the CC is not right anyway - it's way too crushed).

This scene had the worst production sound of any of the work we did. Levels on the actors are okay, but there was a lot of background noise that we could not get rid of (refrigerators, etc.). I've been working in Audacity to do noise removal/reduction, but more than likely this scene will probably have to be ADR'd, at least on some of the cuts.

Used a Rode NT3 on this and a Fostex FR2LE.
 
My initial impression is that all the shots with the bartender work.
He's a fantastic actor, and you could cut his shots in any number of ways
and they would all work fine. Beyond his acting chops, all of his shots
just look better in terms of lighting, framing, composition, and background.

The shots of the female talent are more problematic because they don't look
as good based on the previously mentioned elements and the acting is less
stellar. (No doubt, she has the more difficult lines to deliver convincingly.)

I think I prefer using more of the long shots
from the first cut to cover this up a bit, and I think her more dead pan performance
in the first cut is more convincing. Also, some of the over the shoulder shots in the
second cut put his head almost directly in front of her face in a distracting way.

I think it would be good for the scene if you could push in on the characters, though,
(two souls bonding in face of the coming apocalypse and all)
and the more I look at it I think you can use a lot of the closer shots in the second cut if you
cut more quickly into her lines. Maybe cut on the last eye blink before she delivers the line
and cut down on her listening and reaction time. Do you have any more closeups of her that you
could try out?

Looks like a very cool project and some of these shots, particularly of the bartender are stunning.
I won't mention the audio problems at the moment but it would be nice if you could turn the song down
as its getting in the way of the dialogue. Maybe you are using it at the moment cover some other sound issues
so that is perfectly understandable if that is the case, but it really should come down in the end.

Anyway, keep cutting. It's looking good.

Best of luck,

Max
 
Thanks Max - Yes I've got quite a bit to work with in terms of footage and I think it sounds like a good idea to stay with the closer shots as you mentioned, aside from the wider shots with the more deadpan performance in the earlier bits of the take (I agree that at least several of these are more convincing than on the closer takes). I do full scene takes from each angle at least twice - all of my actors are stage actors and I find they do best when they go all the way through the scene each time, when I break things up for a single line delivery from a particular angle it just doesn't work so well. It was sort of an odd location since we've got the full-warm looking bar background with the male talent and then a totally black background on the female talent (was the nature of the space) - it does give it a sort of...outer-space feel to her shots almost - but that's okay. She's a good actor, it's just a matter of me building the best performance out of her as she played it a little differently in each take and her lines are tougher. The guy (Billy) is just...well, he's amazing - and I'm incredibly lucky to be working with him and his character will have more than an hour of screen presence in the film...he's one of those people who could just read the phonebook to you and you'd be interested! Casting him was the best move I've made on the film - but he's also so good that no matter who you put up next to him in a scene, and regardless of how good they are - he steals the show! That said, there are much worse problems to have, and given the film's budget (a little less than $10K) I am just incredibly lucky to be working with the talent I've got - they are all wonderful and some of them have real future potential - I think Billy may have some serious offers for roles once this movie hits.

Re: audio - yeah, audio is absolutely nowhere near what it will end up in its final form and as I wait for my studio monitors to arrive I'm mixing on headphones which does not work well!
 
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still have no idea how you're getting such amazing noiseless blacks and low light footage. what gives...i get FPN and banding even at 160-200 ISO
 
Homunculus said:
still have no idea how you're getting such amazing noiseless blacks and low light footage. what gives...i get FPN and banding even at 160-200 ISO
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We had 4 lights going for this scene which really gave us the ability to shoot this in a number of ways given various aperture/iso combinations - we never got over ISO 400 - in fact we were pretty much shooting at ISO 100-200 the whole time (Ha, "we," in this scene none of my crew was available and it was a one man operation aside from the talent - I even had the mic on a boom stand...)

We had so much light that I even had to use NDs on the shots where I was going for shallow DOF. Obviously the scene doesn't look "bright" but I was going for dynamic/high contrast - and everything you see, say on the bartender shots is lit. 3 on the actor, and one filling in the shadows and bringing up the exposure value of the bottles, etc., behind the bar.

In general I always light so that I can shoot at least as high as f/4 (usually I like to even be able to shoot at f/5.6 if the actor will be moving) in the ISO100-200 range and then go from there and I try to get highlight underexposed by a stop so I don't clip skin tones, etc., and that gives some flexibility in post.

I come from a still photography background (15 yrs) and exposure is everything to me - I sort of live and breathe it and the GH1 seems very capable if noiseless blacks so long as you expose the blacks correctly - the FPN really seems to come out when the scene isn't lit right, even if the GH1 says exposure is okay, I don't know how to describe it exactly, but it seems like if you're making the GH1 itself work hard to get the exposure right, you run into FPN, if you make it easy on the camera, you don't run into these problems. A caveat here - there may be a difference between "lighting right," and "lighting right for the GH1," and it takes some time to figure out what really works for this camera - I did extensive testing for months before I started shooting the film.

Then again, FPN seems to vary from camera to camera but when I have found it in my footage, it's almost always due to the exposure not really being right. I also exclusively use fast lenses, I don't even have the kit lens. This was shot with a Zeiss 50mm f/1.4, Canon 24mm f/1.4 L and a Samyang 85mm f/1.4.

The advice for using this camera that I use the most comes from the notes posted on the Hot Rod Camera's site by the folks who shot "Rejeour," with the GH1 - and while I'm not crazy about all the shots or even the look of the film from the trailer they have, I think their advice re: exposure is dead-on for this camera. I can't remember if I used the Tiffen T-1 IR cut filter on this scene, but I use it often and this is also something they recommend for cleaner blacks.
 
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What the hell - while we're at this, one more rough cut of a scene. This one shot anamorphically and may help slightly with the context of the bar scene.


password: dragons

Again - Sound has not yet been touched on this so sound should not be considered what it will be in its final form - this is the one other scene in which we'll likely need some ADR.
 
Demistate said:
Be careful with your highlights on the shirts. They're getting blown out and it looks less film-like.
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Totally - they aren't clipped in the original footage but I had some issues when I did a color-correction pass - they didn't clip in AE but they clipped when I took them back into Edius - I'll have to get this all sorted out!
 
What struck me more that anything else was everyone 'was talking' in the shots. There were few 'reaction' shots of the person listening to the speaker.

If you have shots of 'reactions' you may want to experiment with them.
 
Interesting. If you were to pitch this movie to someone, what would you say? DIY is cool.

Is there a bible theme to the film? Just curious overall.
 
The film is a dark-comedy/satire about the end of humanity. What's different about this film from other end-of-days films, is that the film is not about visual effects nor is it about the inhabitants of earth going feral. This film focuses on two things, so we've got a split-narrative story going on here with just about equal time given to each story. The first story is about logistics. It's the end of the world and God has assembled a team to carry out the apocalypse on Earth. This story is shot in a documentary style a la The Office, This is Spinal Tap. We meet God, Bobo (God's assistant), and Rapture Rose (apocalyptic consultant). We watch them as they try to take what's written on the page and turn it into reality -- of course they run into logistical challenges just like any business might. In this case, the horseman's union is on strike, they never had a Beast of the Sea, aren't sure how it ended up in the Bible anyways...and don't know where to get one. To top it all off, the book of life has been destroyed and so they're going to have to go to earth and do in-person judgments with all the inhabitants.

The second story focuses on the relationship between Joanne, an astronomer who's witnessing the beginnings of apocalyptic events (i.e. moon turning into blood) on Earth and the woman she is in love with, Sammy (a particle physicist). It's sort of the classic unrequited love story with a twist. In this case, it's a girl who happens to be in love with a girl who doesn't know she exists...and not in an abstract sense, it's even worse -- due to Sammy's extreme scientific mindset, while she does interact with Joanne, refuses to acknowledge that Joanne exists citing the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle. The good news? Sammy is trying to disprove the Uncertainty Principle and is near a breakthrough...but will she solve the puzzle in time? Sounds pretty bad...but it gets worse. Joanne's a virgin. The story examines classic scenarios under extreme circumstances and a hard time constraint. Sammy's relativistic mind makes things even worse -- she's given Joanne hope, she acknowledges that she doesn't love Joanne back *now* - but that could change in the future, there's simply no way she could know whether or not her mind might change. Great news right? Not when you've only got two weeks to figure out how to make it happen. But she is determined not to let this all go down without a fight.

There is one way out -- in the "report for judgment" cards that have been sent out to the inhabitants of earth, one can elect to skip judgment and "take their chances with the dragons" which will be left behind once the apocalypse is over...of course there's a catch, if you do happen to be eaten by a dragon (bad enough, right?) where your soul ends up in the afterlife is chosen at random.

The two stories interweave until it's time for Joanne to go in for her judgment meeting.

---

To say there is a bible theme wouldn't really be correct. I wouldn't call it a religious film as the film does not contain a religious message.

It's a story that is meant to examine a relationship under extreme duress. An apocalypse is about as extreme as you get. Lots of ways you can write an apocalypse story, but in this case we decided to go with the biblical apocalypse narrative and just assume it's true for the purposes of story. It could have been a Zeus-apocalypse story and it would play the same way, but there is a great deal of material in the biblical apocalypse narratives that is intriguing from a story perspective and interesting to dissect although certainly but with a great deal of artistic license - the film would be enjoyable regardless of one's familiarity with the Bible. It would probably be more enjoyable with at least rudimentary knowledge of the Bible in terms of catching some of the jokes, but it's not necessary. Think of of the web series "Mr. Diety," it's similar in some respects to the way we're working with an anthropomorphized God and focus on his relationships with his employees and logistical issues.

It's sort of an...oh ****, it's the apocalypse and...oh ****...it's the biblical apocalypse at that...which also creates conflict as we're dealing with atheistic scientist character types in second story, so not only do they have to deal with an apocalypse, they have to deal with the fact that it turns out that the Bible was true after all. That said, the film is not malicious towards religion or Christianity - it takes it very much at face value. I don't believe it's blasphemous, even though it's likely heretical at times. Personally, I am an athiest but have always been interested in Biblical scholarship and theology and grew up in an evangelical community so I have a good deal of experience with the subject. Ultimately, this movie is about exploring, not making determinations, it's about asking questions and seeing how people react to extreme circumstances. Most of all, the film is about entertainment and making people laugh and think at the same time. Think Life of Brian meets Dr. Stranglove.
 
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Looks really nice. Might the bartender's CU be graded too warm and yellow-y when compared to the other shots? I kind of noticed it when comparing it to the back of the bartender's head in the OTS on the girl.
 
ryancglover said:
before that synopsis, i had no real idea of the scope of your film.. whoa! Keep at it!
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'tis but a mere 200 pg script....what the hell am I thinking...half of it's shot...you'd think after shooting 100 pgs I could say that I've shot a feature film, but in this case it's only half. I'll have lots to work with when making the cut, however - still gonna be a 2-2.5 hr film. Shooting the first scene from "story 1" Saturday. "Story 2" has all been shot except for the final scene which involves green-screen, cg dragons, katanas and grenades.
 
"To say there is a bible theme wouldn't really be correct. I wouldn't call it a religious film as the film does not contain a religious message."

​
I had stayed away so far because I suspected it might be a religious-nut type propaganda thing (Left Behind?). I'm so sick of religious looney tunes, living here in a red area of a blue state (middle America or middle ages?).

So anyway -- my only problem with this plot is: What's God's motivation?

Why the whim to just destory the planet?

Seems a bit silly, and it is the central thrust of the "apocalypse" narrative (although Revelations is likely the drug induced vision of someone writing about ancient Rome and its desired destruction).

I always like the way Monty Python pulls off religious material, with an ironic twist and a new improved ingredient here and there. I hope you have followed that tradition and have something added to the mix.

On that note, maybe a title change? As I said it was unclear where you were coming from or going until I read the quoted blurb above.

The second part of the title works, but perhaps the first part could use an overhaul. Is anyone actually doing something "for the Love of God?" It sounds like your lesbian character is looking for the love of a physicist.

Are the supernatural characters doing something expressly for the love of God? Or is this stuff just in their job description?
 
polfilmblog said:
I always like the way Monty Python pulls off religious material, with an ironic twist and a new improved ingredient here and there. I hope you have followed that tradition and have something added to the mix.

On that note, maybe a title change? As I said it was unclear where you were coming from or going until I read the quoted blurb above.
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Thanks for checking out the thread. I'd say Monty Python is one of my primary influences in writing this film - so if you enjoy Life of Brian, I think you will enjoy this film. The jokes are mine, the writing is mine, but there is no doubt that you'll find the spirit of Monty Python in this film.

I think you have a fair point with regards to the title - the script has shifted and God's story in particular has changed throughout rewrites of the film and I think I will need to think about that as this goes on and determining the final title - in the earlier versions of the script the title made a bit more sense.

God is not the central character in this film, even though it is a significant part and a lead role. Even "lead" is dubious. This film is an ensemble piece in the way a Python film or a Christopher Guest film are ensembles. There are really...6 leads. Joanne the astronomer, Sammy the physicist, Ellen the fish-scientist who communicates with genetically altered fish by blinking in Morse code and is Joanne's best friend, and a Mercurial archetype - crazy but wise. God. Bobo, God's sidekick. And Rapture Rose.

Re: Book of Revelation - there are many ways to analyze this and people throughout the ages have found one way or another to make the case that the apocalypse was near because of X,Y,Z - for the purposes of story the way we have it setup is that God has a whole universe full of planets that have Bibles of various kinds, and so part of his job, and his team's job is to carry out apocalypses on various planets, asteroids, etc., on a nearly constant basis and it just happens to be Earth's turn (or Earth 12 as they refer to it). Why God puts apocalypse narratives into Bibles isn't addressed, it's just a given for the purposes of this story - and it's not particularly relevant to the story, his reasoning "why," the film isn't about that, it's about examining a a complicated relationship under an extreme set of circumstances. Assuming (for the purposes of this story) that the Bible's narrative is true, even then no one really knows when the apocalypse might happen on Earth, so it might as well be now - and with infinitely many planets under his domain, it's just about always time for an apocalypse somewhere in the universe.

God's motivation in this film is just to get through the process - he does this all the time and for the most part, he's sick of it. The film is really about seeing things from all kinds of perspectives, how on one hand an apocalypse could be a very big deal to the people it's happening to, and yet it could be just about meaningless to the people who are responsible for it - so the ways in which they interact, how they relate (as we have lots of interaction between the "God" team and the people of earth who are being judged in the "judgment" scenes - which are all very, very Pythonesque. The film is really about challenging perspectives and finding understanding when characters we end up liking do things that we're not so sure about (trying not to give away too much here) - it's also about examining God and his actions through a human lens, taking liberty with the notion that man was created in God's image, so the reverse should also be true - so we project human qualities/imperfections onto the God character as well.

Re: Supernatural characters - Bobo is a sycophantic character not unlike Dwight from the US version of the Office - she really wants God's job. Rapture Rose is a hired-gun, she's the best apocalypse coordinator in the universe - nobody can pull off destruction like she can - but she's just *able* to do it, she doesn't like doing it, and she had to be won over by God (came out of retirement) in order to do this last job, and at a very steep price (an expanding quadrant of the universe) - she always goes too far, even for her own stomach (she tells stories about, say, blowing up an orphanage for the deaf, mute, and blind atop a cliff overhang and then filling the waters beneath with piranhas, for example) and it's part of her own inner-conflict.

A taste of story 1. Notes: this is the very first table read we did of this scene - it's hyper, hyper rough...hyper rough...really. The interviewer and the girl playing Rapture Rose were very stiff in this first read. Bobo has pretty much got it nailed, but I've been working with her for much longer. All that said, this will give you a taste of the kind of jokes and the way we're handling the religious/supernatural. Please do not judge me for the video/sound quality of this clip - it's just for documentary and review purposes, although it's a good example of loose focus and how bad things look if you don't use lights even if you've got a really great fast lens (Canon 24mm f/1.4 L) and why on-camera sound sucks.

Password: dragons

 
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ThisHideousReplica said:
Looks really nice. Might the bartender's CU be graded too warm and yellow-y when compared to the other shots? I kind of noticed it when comparing it to the back of the bartender's head in the OTS on the girl.
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Yeah - these are tricky to match - but I'll get it right eventually or hire a colorist! :)
 
Honestly there is not much you can do about this now but I am not blown away by the acting of the pink and brown haired girls. Don't know what to say there. Sometimes it is passable which is fine and others it seems a little forced. I know that's hard if you are not paying them or paying them low amounts of money. I would take out those fades at the end on the beach. They seem odd. Maybe just show them stand up and walk out of frame and then have them at the next location. You could also show them walking, J cut the audio in so that you hear the conversation where they are stationary a second before you cut from them walking to them standing. J and L cuts help with weird cuts.
 
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