I enjoyed every bit of making this film, be it filming or editing. I feel like I have learnt a very valuable skill that I shall hopefully use again throughout my life. It was a huge learning process as I barely ever film anything, having a camera which is best suited to photography. Furthermore I usually focus on plants, trees, animals, landscapes, buildings or objects as my subjects, but rarely people. And finally, I have never put together a film or used an editing software.
When I first decided to film Phil and Billy, they were not going to be the focus of my whole film. I had planned on finding multiple off-grid people to be in it. However during my stay with them, I got hours of footage and it turned out to all be pretty clear in image and sound. Furthermore, after some consideration, I realised that the layout I had previously planned sounded too much like a documentary. So I decided to make this an observational film of my unique short stay with Phil and Billy and show the audience a day in their lives.
Once I handed in my dissertation and a couple of other assignments, it was time to start editing. During the next few days, the Hugh Brody room became our home. There were always between two and ten people in there editing and helping each-other out. I saw many beautiful films, all with completely different styles and stories. I can't wait till the 31st when I'll get to watch them all properly!
My editing process started with quickly going through most of my footage, at which point a structure began to form in my head. Since I was doing "a day in the life", my timeline was pretty easy to create and most of the videos were already in the right order. I created one bin for timelines, one for "atmosphere shots" that featured no people, one for the other clips and one for titles. I had a funny scene where Phil attempts to make roofing shingles but fails because the log is frozen, and then cuts his hand and says I should probably not be filming him. I thought this would make a fun and a little confusing introduction, before the title appears and gives some context. However I wanted my first shot to be one of the forest, ending up at the house, to sort of create the atmosphere.
I had a cool shot of water dripping off some icicles that I decided to use for the title. And after that, I thought I'd add a little context and show a part of my interview with Phil where he talks about how he ended up here. He finishes by saying "we're just taking it step by step" which I thought was a perfect time to start the "day in the life". I went through all of my footage then, taking out the interesting bits, going through everything we did that day, trying to make the scene transitions as smooth as possible... And then at the end I decided to go back to the interview and have him talk about "off-grid". I was so happy when I finished... until I realised that I had made my video almost 20 minutes long!
The next day I spent about 12 hours straight in the Hugh Brody room taking out little bits here and there, sometimes a whole scene, trying to get the video down to 12 minutes long. As soon as I managed, I uploaded the video and put it onto youtube to share with some friends for feedback. I also showed it to everyone who was in the editing room with me at the time. The two main people I wanted feedback from were my housemate Kausar who is a film student, and my friend Carys who makes a lot of short films. By the next day I had a list of things to work on.
The first thing was that the cuts in the interview were too jarring, so I decided to cover those up by showing a different scene while Phil was talking. It turned out well because I switched to a scene of the both of them walking in the woods, just as he says "it was my family's woodland". The second thing was that I hadn't worked on the sound at all, and the chainsaw scene was much too loud. Furthermore the interview scenes weren't loud enough, and Carys noticed some background microphone noise which she suggested I use DeNoiser to get rid of. This was a problem because DeNoiser doesn't exist on my 2017 Premier Pro (she was using the 2014 version). However, after trying to use the new version which I did not like, I discovered a file named "obsolete audio effects" which had DeNoiser. After using that the sound seemed much better.
Besides those two main points, there were a few cuts to smooth out, and I overlapped a couple of scenes and shortened an other couple of scenes, until finally it was done! I sent the film to Phil, which I was a little nervous about, but he said he loved it. Now all that was left was to submit it via WeTransfer...