Fine Cut and Adding Music

This afternoon I finished my cut of the film, implementing the changes we discussed in our tutorial and now just waiting to add Jamie's music track.

Following the advice we received yesterday, I added a couple of extra establishing shots at the start of the film (below), and some more detail from Ralph's interview about when it was that he joined the army - 'Well when I got to 19, I went into the army then. I think it was 1947/48, might have been '48.'

I also went through the film and paced it more effectively, leaving pauses between Ralph speaking, holding longer on photos and making the movement across them slower to give the audience time to look around the images.

Additionally, I swapped the places of the two sequences we discussed, one of Ralph wanting children and the other of his mother's issues with Karla. This seems to flow more logically from the previous sequence about moving to Germany, but I had to include a couple more cutaways and soundbites from the interview to make it work.

We had been discussing for a while the way in which we should transition from Ralph's happier memories to that of his wife passing away. The change in tone was quite difficult to implement without it feeling abrupt or insensitive, and our initial structure did not work due to a number of factors. I suggested using Ralph talking about revisiting Germany for holidays in the summer, but now that he's older he says wants to stay put. This was a useful marker for changing to a much slower pace, and for the music and narration to fade out.

In this sequence I used photos of Ralph and Karla at home to support what he had just said, holding on the photos for longer to make the pace slow and meditative. To convey his wife's passing I dissolved the image of Karla in the garden into the matching shot we took. I followed this with a shot of the clock and Karla's photo, reintroducing Ralph's speech over the top - 'I think it was about 7 years back when she died... yeah.'

At this point we had planned to create a sequence about Ralph sitting by the pond at the cemetery, but it did not seem natural to start another anecdote to bring the pace up again. Instead, I selected a few shorter soundbites to put over the images, particularly those referring directly to his thoughts on keeping the photos.

As we had discussed it, the end of the film came together quite simply, and was just a case of drawing out the pauses between his speech as much as possible to maintain the pace.

For the end image of the film we used a photo of Ralph and Karla together, and during the credit sequence I added the 'Edelweiss' section which we hadn't found a place for elsewhere. We were aware that giving the film essentially two endings might be confusing for the audience. However, we felt it was important to leave the film on a more positive note, and so all agreed it should be included.

Jamie had created several different music tracks for the second part of the film, which we listened to, picked the best and then added into the sound mix. After this was done I added the final touches: balancing audio, smoothing out transitions and colour correction. For the most part this involved removing the orange mid-tones from the shots on the XF305, adjusting the dark shadows during the kitchen interviews and making it as consistent as possible throughout.