Fiction Adaptation | Post-production: Rough Cut

I started the first rough cut after wrapping the first shoot set in Abdullah's home country.   I had intended for this scene to be around 1-1:30 minutes in duration, but it ended up at just under two and a half minutes.  This meant I would have to cut out some footage out so that the full film fit the brief of 5 minutes.

I started the edit using the shallow depth of field shots to establish the setting, focusing on the ruined brick structure and the foliage to create a sense of destruction by drawing attention to the desolate landscape.  I added some colour grading for this scene for two reasons: the original footage was more saturated, bringing the more vibrant green colours from the grass, and there is a time-jump during this, so I made the second half of the clip darker to give the impression that it was later on in the afternoon/evening.

There are a lot of cuts in the first scene as I wanted to make the audience empathise with Abdullah by highlighting the eratic, fast-paced and confused nature of the scene.  This contrasts with the scene after Abdullah wakes up, which has fewer cuts as the situation has calmed down a lot since he has been asleep, and so he is calmer than he was previously.

I have incorporated some intellectual montage in this scene by cutting between the shot of the water and Abdullah's face which suggests that he wants to travel over the water, which he would later do to escape his country.

Note: There is no sound in the first edit as I would be adding this later.  There was a lot of wind interference on the first shoot, so I needed to spend more time perfecting it before adding it to the edit.

Here is the first rough cut, which only includes the first scene: 




After coming back to the edit, I started to work on the sound design.  I particularly focused on adding to the warlike atmosphere I wanted to create, which I achieved by finding some royalty-free ambient sounds to transport us to a war-zone.

In this version of the edit, I also added black bars to the top and bottom of the frame to give an anamorphic-look to the film.  By adopting a 2.40:1 aspect ratio, this gives the film a more cinematic quality, and condenses the action into a smaller frame.

Here is the second rough cut, which also only includes the first scene:



After I shot the rest of my footage, I was able to compile most of the footage into the timeline.

I added a high-pitched tone to transition between Abdullah taking cover and waking up later that day, and combined with the Gaussian blur effect I added, this built a more convincing transition between day and evening.  I found that in my experimental piece, this was effective in building up tension, which would work well for this scene.  I was also able to add more and fine tune some of the audio.

The next scene in Abdullah's kitchen was very easy to edit, due to the lack of action.  I found it to be very effective to add long pauses that did not necessarily happen on the shoot, so to add to the awkward nature of the exchange.  The aim of this scene is to highlight Abdullah's desire to integrate into British society, mirroring the line in the sonnet "how beautiful if such a place were mine" - depicting the narrative voice's desire to reach this 'beautiful' place.

The third scene was also fairly straightforward to edit and I was able to be a bit more creative with the use of shots compared to the previous scene.  The audio has more work to be done, as you can hear me directing in the background, but this should not be difficult as I recorded several buzz tracks on the shoot.

I felt that it was vital to include such harsh language in this scene to illustrate the problem of intolerance in today's society, which is what I aimed to do in my adaptation of the poem.  I have heard this sort of language being used in the street, and so even though it may be difficult to hear somebody saying this to somebody's face, by drawing attention to it in my film, I want to highlight that this is a topical issue that should be dealt with.

At this point in the edit, I decided that I would cut the mother and child scene from the film for several reasons.  Firstly, I feel that it would disrupt the pacing of the film as a whole - having Abdullah react to seeing a mother and child, and reminiscing about his family back home distracts from the action of the previous scene with the racist attack.  I also encountered a continuity issue during filming which meant I could not use one of the shots that I wanted to.

Here is the rough cut:



I was now entering the final stages of the edit.  In this version, I added the last scene, which I will later cut into a montage using clips from the previous scenes.

I really hammered down on the audio in this edit, by adding voices from a royalty-free site to add to the impression that Abdullah is being chased.  I feel I may have gone a little overboard with the voices, so I will probably tweak this before the final cut.

I also spent a few hours working on adding a visual effect to one of the scenes so it appeared there was a plume of smoke in the background of one of the shots.  This is not something I had done before, and so I was eager to try my best to create a realistic-looking effect.  I began by tracking the motion in the background so that the effect I added would move with the camera.  I then added the effect (which I found on a website for free), keyed out the alpha channel, tweaking the speed, opacity, brightness, contrast, exposure and colours before finally masking it to appear behind the bush.  I am very happy with how this has turned out and I have learned some very valuable skills in Adobe After Effects.

In the next scene, I worked on refining the audio by removing some knocks and clicks that occurred during filming.  I also removed some of the hissing in the background - I initially used the sound removal tool which I had used a lot in the past, but I found this made the dialogue sound very tinny and degraded the quality of the audio more than I was comfortable with.  Therefore I used the hiss removal tool which was much more subtle and effective.

For the town centre scene I tweaked the colour grading, and fixed the audio by incorporating the buzz track.

I was able to add the final scene which I had decided should only focus on Abdullah as he is praying at home.  I tweaked the brightness and contrast to bring out the dark and light tones in the scene and isolate him in the frame by making Abdullah appear as a silhouette.

I felt the final shot should end on Abdullah's clothes from when he was escaping his home country as this brings home that he is still a refugee, and he will always be persecuted because of this.

Here is the full rough cut:



In the final cut, I aim to add montage elements to the final scene and to add titles for the beginning and for the credits, as well as fine tuning the audio and colour grading.  I will also need to cut out some shots to fit with the brief of 5 minutes.