We began by sifting through the 200+ clips that our lovely camera had produced for us - all up, about 2 hours of footage. Little did we know during filming, the camera produced a separate video file every time the 'record' button was switched on and off. That meant happy times for us! (sarcasm)
We spent several hours deleting all the rubbish takes we didn't need for the final film. As amateur actors (but expert directors, of course), there were lots of mistakes with lines and dialogue that we needed to remove.
The good thing about this process however was the sheer hilarity. Working closely with good friends meant that we could laugh at each others' mistakes captured on camera to our heart's content.
Unfortunately, even some of our good footage was marred by some overlooked mistakes. Several of out interior shots had lighting equipment visible in the background (eep!). Other shots turned out to contain far too many shadows - it seems that our camera's LCD display was set to very bright, so we didn't notice during filming.
Luckily, these oversights could be easily corrected. We weren't ready to properly add effects to our footage yet, but we played around with a few correction techniques:
- Brightness/Contrast adjustment: An amazingly easy effect to implement in Final Cut Pro. By dragging a filter onto the footage, I was able to adjust the brightness and contrast of particular scenes to reduce flooding light and soften shadows.
- Colour adjustment: There was one particular scene where we forgot to white balance the camera. I added a colour filter over top of this clip, and tinted it slightly yellow to match the sunlight. The result turned out very nicely.
- Zoom & crop: In the scenes with visible equipment, we were forced to zoom in the video and crop out the edges in order to remove the unwanted objects. Unfortunately this caused the video to lose a bit of quality, but luckily we filmed in High Definition, so it wasn't too bad.
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