"After reading a poem, Gohan, a small otherworldly being, walks around Vancouver searching for the woman it was based off"
This was a final project that I worked on with 2 other group members for IAT 344, based on a poem by a local artist, Angela May, "Single Mother on Hastings".
My roles were Director of Photography & Editor.
EXAMPLES OF WORK
I compiled all the footage from multiple cameras, gathering sound from external audio recordings, and animations from our animator, and matched it all together using Premier Pro. By using precision, I also made sure specific cuts matched up properly with the poem.
An example is during one of the stanzas, we made sure each line would show certain clips of Vancouver City and cut to the next scene as the next line would come up.
For most scenes, I had to manually scroll through the video frames and ensure our animated character's size and positioning matched the scenes we had planned. This scene, in particular, starts with a close-up shot with just the head and slowly pans out to a long shot. To achieve this, I had to scale up the background and animation, and as the video continued, their scale would decrease.
In some scenes, I needed the character to appear in the background behind certain objects like trees, wooden posts, and in this case, a hand. I created masks that matched the objects and went frame by frame to make it seamless.
I also had to deal with external and internal audio that had to be edited using Adobe Audition. For the voice-over, we met up at my studio to record the voiceover, which was mastered to make sure the audio sounded clear and crisp. For some scenes like that including the poet, we didn't have an external audio recorder at the time, so I had to improvise. I wasn't able to remove the sounds of wind, and overwrote it with fake winds into the voiceover to make it match up.
Reflection on my editing process
As an editor, I found most of the editing straightforward, but using mixed media in this project was new for me. Having to work with the animator, I had to figure out what their vision was when they were using sample frames for their animation and had to recreate that in the scenes. The most difficult scenes were the ones where the camera would be moving and panning, so for me to achieve smooth framing for the character, I would go frame by frame and make sure it looked as though the character was a part of this world. I still think that it could be better but for the first time, I think it turned out better than I expected. Some other challenge I faced in this project was making sure shots were still enough for the character to be placed. I knew beforehand that post-production stabilization isn't the best, so without a gimble, I had to be completely still while moving a lot.
Behind the Scene footage from our video shoots and some stills from my favourite shots using my Sony A7iii
