Night Journey - Fine Cut

In the last few days before the final viewing of our Night Journey films, we moved on to the Fine Cut stage in the editing process and began to put the finishing touches to it and make it a tight and solid film. After reviewing the Rough Cut over the past few days, we decided that the visuals we had put together worked well in conjunction with one another as well as the narration we had put under it, so in the Fine Cut we would focus mainly on cleaning up the audio and pacing, with only minor tweaks to the video to sync it with the sound. We started off by mixing the music together in a cross-fade to make the sound flow more smoothly and progress the narrative by building and releasing tension.

Using the quick transition tool to get audio cross-fade mix.

Executing this was relatively straight forward in that we only had to use the quick transition tool, however, because we wanted the one of the tracks to carry on subtly under the new one, we positioned to songs on different tracks and added a slow fade in on the new track as the other faded out naturally. This was to connote a change in the narrative and how the tension changes as the cannibal character loses control of the situation.
We kept our focus on finalising the music by next using multiple track audio keyframing to dip out both the music and folley sounds when narration came in so that you can still hear it underneath the voice over.

Audio keyframe layering to keep the mood consistent.

The reason behind doing this was firstly to make sure the audience can clearly hear the narration and not be overpowered by the volume of the folley and music, but also to keep both of these playing in the background faintly, so the immersion of the audience into the story isn't broken due to the voice-over being introduced.
Layering the audio correctly and effectively was also a big concern, due to the amount of different aspects going on within it.

Audio mixer showing different levels of each audio track.

We were taught to always have the dialogue tracks as audio tracks one and two, as well as to have each pair of tracks to contain the same audio on where possible (using stereo instead of mono). The organisation of our tracks mirrored this as you can see and we kept it as neat and simple as possible to make the edit less problematic and more efficient.
When all these different layers of sound are occurring at the same time, the noise can be too much for the audience to process as well as being technically incorrect by the levels peaking and distorting the sound. To combat this, we relied heavily on the Audio Mixer tool in the Fine Cut to constantly re-adjust the levels for each pair of audio tracks and make sure they didn't peak and distort the sound.

Multiple audio tracks playing to monitor the levels and adjust accordingly.

As you can see, the first two tracks are the loudest as they are the narration and we want this to be heard over all the rest of the sounds. If any sounds were too loud and made the narration difficult to understand, we would group the tracks that the sound was located on and turn the levels down (as you can see in tracks 3,4 and 5).
Finally, after doing all of this audio editing, we decided to go through the whole film one or two more times in order to review what we had just done, as well as spotting any errors or ways to improve anything. Near the middle of the sequence, when the male character goes into a small dream sequence, we thought that it wasn't entirely clear that it was a dream and that this ambiguity and assumption we made wouldn't be understood by the audience. To combat this, we moved the narration around slightly, as well as adding a flash cut from where the sequence starts and ends.

Dip to Colour transition effect used to mimic flash cut into a different space.

We also assisted this connotation by cutting the music out of the dream sequence completely and replacing it with folley atoms which we believed worked effectively at drawing the audience out of one space and location to another.
After viewing the whole film one final time, we decided that we were happy with what we had produced, minus a few small sections, and that we had thoroughly improved and advanced since the last project as well as massively improving the rough cut.

Final Fine Cut sequence.

We will show the final export in this weeks seminar tomorrow and get formative verbal feedback from both the tutor and our peers which we will reflect on and use to apply to the final brief.