Music Problems

Lucy, Catherine and I had our hearts set on using a Phil Collins song, 'Sussudio' as we felt this was the absolute perfect song to go with our 80's-set film. We were disheartened when we learned that we could not use copyrighted music, and knew we had to find a quick substitute.

Lucy and I spent 3 hours trying to use garage band, a software that we both had little experience using, to try and make an 80's cheesy piece of music, and it's harder than we first thought! We wanted the cheesy music to turn to a sudden dramatic sound at certain moments of the film opening so we noted down the timings in the film of when we wanted the music to change, so that we would know when to put that certain sound in when making the song. Once we got into a creative flow we managed to develop a sound that we felt was acceptable for the film. Although it was not what we had previously hoped to use, we thought the song would be a fine replacement.

However, once we completed the song we exported it to iTunes and realised the song was 2.30 minutes long and we only wanted it to be 1.30. We realised that what we thought was the seconds on garageband, was another measure and we had completely mistaken what it meant! This was disastrous as we knew that we could fix the problem by shortening the song, but this meant that we would need to completely change where we put certain sounds. We would have to completely change the timings!

Although we can certainly fix this problem with a bit of time and effort, it has certainly been the most stressful/problematic part of the production process and we have certainly learned from our mistake. In order to fix this problem Lucy and I are dedicating 2 hours tomorrow (9/03/12) to just sit down and work through it systematically and cut it down fix the timings.

Editing

At the beginning of the editing process I thought it was going well. We all sat together and decided what we would do with each shot and how we would cut it and put it into the sequence. By the time we had finished our first basic editing (a rough edit which we know we will need to go back and improve) we felt that our opening was okay so far however we noticed a few problems and realized we haddn't thought of everything when planning. Some of the problems were; a lack of variety of shots and some shots are too long and need shortening. When we showed our sequence to our teacher she pointed out a few things that I haddn't noticed, so although it was critical of our work, I know it would help in the long run. Now we are currently working on the points that our teacher had directed us to focus on.

Overall, although I knew editing would not be an easy task, I haddn't anticipated that so many problems would arise. In my opinion, it's not the physical editing itself that causes problems, it's more the errors that we made when filming that causes editing to be tricky. However I do believe that the majority of problems can be dealt with by focusing on how we edit each shot and put it all together.