34. Publishing and moving on

On to the next film! My vision for this project was for it to be the first short film in a series of short documentary biographies about people in New York City. I certainly learned a lot about the process, and I am sure that as I go on, I will continue to learn even more. Hopefully the next film will be out soon!

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33. Editing Step 11: Final Refinements

Refining was the last step that I followed. For the most part, this merely meant rewatching the film, and making any final changes, etc. The things that were most common were slight changes in the timing of shots.

The most work in this refining step, however, was editing the subtitles and texts. In many places this meant fixing spelling or words and names, etc. This was a bit more difficult than I had imagined, because the whole film was subtitled, but I don't know Spanish! It am very grateful for Ramon's help in that process.

Another aspect of the refining step was to actually show the film to a few people before releasing it. To be sure, reviewing and showing the film happened at many different times during the whole process. It is always to get a few more eyeballs and perspectives on the film, since my own ideas are so skewed as a result of working on this for as much as I have. Such insights about incidental footage was key in trying to convey the appropriate message at the appropriate time.  

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32. Editing Step 10: Add Transitions

After all the main film was finished, then I had to create other transition portions of the film. What I mean by this is the introduction, the ending credits, and other sorts of transitions to help divide the film into sections or chapters. I had already created the title sequence sometime before. But there were a few changes that I wanted to make.

To the introduction sequence, or title sequence, I had originally made text fly across the screen. It bothered my eyes, so I suspect that it would bother the eyes of other viewers, too. So I cut down the sentences to single words, and allowed them to stay on the screen across different shots. I think it ended up looking better.

Another set of transitions that I knew I wanted from the beginning was to divide chapters up with a shot of a moving subway train. I had already collected these shots very early in the filming process. So, for the beginning of the film, I wanted a shot of a train arriving. For the end of the film, I wanted a shot of the train leaving the station. And in between, I wanted shots of trains moving or driving along their paths.

The ending credits were a bit more difficult to complete because I didn't have a previous vision of what I wanted. I knew that I wanted moving images, and a more designed credit sequence, more like a tv show than a feature length movie. I was thinking of either editing shots from the film, and reapplying them during the credits, but instead I decided for some shots that I had from Central Park. Because it was the credit sequence, I didn't want the picture to be perfectly clear (like the film), so I made the image a bit washed out and desaturated. Since I learned that iMovie would allow me to import images with transparency, I knew that I could layout the credits with a little bit of originality. I really hate short films that have long credit sequences, so I wanted to use as few pages as possible to attribute all of the necessary credits. It came out to two pages, so I am happy with a complete credit sequence that is less than ten seconds.

After putting together the whole film, with intro, credits, and transitions, it felt a bit rushed after leaving the title screen, and then jumping straight into Ramon talking about himself. So I decided to include a brief introductory segment of several different shots of Ramon, with his name across the screen, telling the viewer what we were about to watch: Ramon Catalan, musician. In order to distinguish this brief introductory segment from the rest of the film, I made it black and white. 

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31. Editing Step 9: Adding Titles and Text

The last thing to include would be any titles and texts that help the viewer identify what is on the screen. iMovie has several nice solutions for this, and I just went with one of their simple ones.

However, the other kinds of titles that were necessary for this film were subtitles. Because a large segment of Ramon's fan base are Spanish speakers, we decided to include Spanish subtitles in order to get a broader audience base. This subtitle requirement changed how a lot of the other text would be displayed. Instead of utilizing lower-third of the screen to help identify people, locations, or music, I had to place that text somewhere else. I didn't want to block any of the focus objects on the screen, I decided to place these text items in the top area of the screen. The problem that arises with using iMovie, however, is that it is very limited in allowing the user to alter the standard templates. That is, I couldn't move the text to a place that I wanted.

I solved this problem by merely imitating the iMovie template as an image and layout that I could better manipulate in Photoshop. I didn't know this before, but iMovie allows me to import images with transparent alpha channels (like a .png file), so this method replaced using iMovie's standard templates. (I found out that iMovie allows using transparent .png files by trying it out; if it didn't work, then I wasn't sure what I was going to do.) This is a great method because it allows for a lot more freedom and creativity it creating static layouts for text. However, if I want something that animates, I don't think that iMovie offers a solution beyond their standard templates, since it does not allow the import of image sequence files.

All this said, I learned too late was that I should leave all titles (like names or other labels on the screen) until the end, also. When I had to change the certain titles for different reasons, it was a nuisance to go back to the earlier mini movie, change the title, re-render the scene, and then bring that new mini movie into the bigger project. 

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30. Editing Step 8: Adding Music

Finding music to fit the scenes was a challenge. One thing that made it easier is the fact that Ramon had produced his own album of music, so I could utilize that. I also used music from Ramon's personal archive. That was nice because it meant that I had access to symphonic music, which was a bit different from the piano music that made up his album. But just finding music that fit the scene was a challenge in general. I thought that this would be easy, but I now see that it takes a special talent to be able to do this. (I'm trying to develop that talent, because I certainly don't believe that I have it

One thing that I learned very quickly was that since I was working in this mini movie method was that I should leave audio tweaks and fixes until the end of the production. It would be bothersome to create some special audio effect, and then decide to have edited out that scene. 

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29. Editing Step 7: Incorporating Secondary Footage

The next step was to add incidental footage. From the beginning, I knew that merely watching the subject tell his story would get boring fast for some viewers. Instead, I wanted to intersperse it with footage that contributed, or showed what he was talking about. Sometimes I used the footage that I shot with him, other times I used footage that I already had from elsewhere, and other times I was able to use archive footage that Ramon provided. In a few instances I resorted to using common license photographs of places. The important part for me here was to credit the photographer, or the owner of the photograph. (Besides Ramon's person archive, I didn't use film or video from anywhere else; I only used my own movie footage.) 

(The mistake, of course, that I made was that I didn't exactly follow this order that I'm laying out here. Instead, I added incidental footage to the film during step four, when I was still working on the thematic mini movies. This was a problem because sometimes the timing of the incidental footage was mistaken, so I would either have to re-render the thematic movie, after fixing the timing, or I just reapplied the incidental footage at this stage. That means that I did double work several times over the course of this project.)

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28. Editing Step 6: Cutting out Tangential Stuff

After rearranging the content, I still had twelve minutes, but I realized that I wanted this film to be more around the neighborhood of less than ten minutes total (with the title sequence, credits, and other filler material to divide the film). Therefore, I set as a goal to cut the twelve minutes down to eight minutes. Eight minutes would give me enough time to include introductions, credits, transitions, and any other last minute additions that I might not have considered earlier.

Since this wasn't a comedy, I cut out one shot that I hoped would get a laugh. After thinking about it, I thought it would be foolish to have only one mediocre laugh for the whole film. (I'm still debating this; maybe I should have kept it in.) I also cut out a large section where Ramon discussed his history in Chile, and his relationship with Chile. I also cut a few little things here and there. To be sure, these were all things that I thought were interesting, but in cutting them out, I realized that I was giving my film a bit more focus, and direction. To be sure, I think that even ten minutes is a long film, and that many viewers will loose attention before that.

Another section that I decided to cut out was in regards to some of Ramon's other side projects. Besides music, he is working a lot in prose writing, and even historical writing, but I decided to cut out some of those things from the film.

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27. Editing Step 5: Combining all thematic content

I then combined those four mini movies into one twelve minute film, which was when I actually began to structure the main film.

The main task here was to figure out which order the film would follow. I decided at this stage that we would go from Past, to Family, to New York City, and finally Music. (To be sure, by the end of the process I felt that this was a bit too constraining, and so I did shake this order up a little bit. I'll talk about that later.) 

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26. Editing Step 4: Giving more focus to thematic content

Now reviewing each of the four thematic mini movies, I edited for more focus, and cut out repetitive, or superfluous content. In doing this, I cut the content down from thirty minutes, to twelve minutes.

At this stage I combined the four thematic movies into the one movie that was going to be the final product. By now I could try to rearrange what I had, and try to make a more interesting film.

The most obvious example of what I mean for this step is in regards to Ramon's past. During this theme, Ramon talked a lot about his experience in Chile, and even some of the Chilean work that he's done while in New York. Due to my personal constraints (of keeping the film under ten minutes), I decided to cut a lot of that content out, in order to focus more on his musical work. 

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25. Editing Step 3: Bringing all thematic content together.

Then I recombined the content into four mini movies, based on themes of family, New York, personal history, and music. By the way, at this stage, I still had the thirty minutes of footage.

So, from those twelve mini movies, I turned them into four mini movies about the four themes. Within each of these mini movies I was able to focus on one theme, and edit out shots that were superfluous or repetitive. For example, if Ramon said something like "I really love New York City" in two different locations, I wouldn't need both of those. Instead, I decided which one was better suited for the film, and I cut out the other one.

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