SIBLINGS FINAL POST-PRODUCTION

Following on from the second shoot and managing to get all of the lip-synch voice over recordings done I finally had all of the footage, sound and assets at my disposal. The main issue that I was going to face was time. With the delay in getting the footage all shot although I had been editing and working on the footage that I had shot there was a lot still to do and a deadline looming. An ill wife for the past month and a busy time at work was not helping either.

The editing carried on in a very similar vein to the initial editing as far as workflow, organisation and using the software went that I have mentioned in my earlier editing post. Similar issues cropped up again and these have been listed below.

LIP-SYNCHING AND SOUND ISSUES
Nearly impossible to get 100% due to phrasing, inflection, tone and pacing. Lots of man hours BUT have got it all pretty close. People obviously will know that the voices of others coming out of the boys mouthes are not their own as the boys are talking themselves in there own voices in the piece. HOWEVER they do need to be as close as possible and I am getting there. The process of this is lengthy and outlined below.

• Recorded the boys in-vision doing saying the parents lines
• Take the clips and put them in a timeline on Adobe Premiere Pro.
• Cueing them up to exact points on the timeline. So the boys audio to start on 1:00 minute.
• Using the play-head in Adobe Premiere Pro and also the waveform as a guide to the start.
• Also the picture of the boys on display and their version of the statement.
• The above: timing, play-head, boys in vision and waveform it all act as a guide for parents.
• Play the clip through so the parents can get the boys timing, inclination, phrasing and tempo.
• Then keep recording on a TASCAM digital recorder the audio until they got it bang on.
• Then the audio files of the parents audio that were recorded are imported into Premiere Pro.
• The audio files are then synched up to replace the boys saying the lines.
• Minor alterations in timing, starting and spacing are added to get the lip-synch to look right.
• Leaving a minimum of 1 second between boys talking as this allows for lagging in the playback. It does make it look a little stilted BUT this added to the effect.
• The boys are in the clip with their lips moving and the sound from the parents coming out.

GRADING THE FOOTAGE
Needs doing but I will leave to the end if time. I am warming to the different types of footage of the boys rather than a uniform one which due to lighting and white balance would have been near on impossible to keep a constant across three shoots over three shooting days in two locations.

LENGTH OF THE PIECE
Due to time constraints to complete the final edit which I envisage being about 20 minutes and the screening time for my MA tutors being only 10 minutes I have worked towards a 10ish minute edit. This will include all of the elements of the piece

STRUCTURAL & NARRATIVE DESIGN
Getting there in my opinion but it has been an uphill battle. I feel the start and the end work well to bookend the piece. Throughout I wanted to mix up all of the opinions on the boys and their own thoughts. I decided that they needed more space and as edits developed so did the screen-time  devoted to the boys themselves and their on screen antics. The voices of others commenting on them grew less and less and were almost insterstituals in-between their own thoughts and added a different pace. Keeping these brief allowed more comments on the boys in the piece and focussed on them and their POV more. Keeping the voices of others brief also made their views seem more blunt and one dimensional which I feel works as snapshots of opinions of the boys. The fact that these were shot single camera and then edited together so the boys do not interact added to this.

AUDIENCE FEEDBACK ON EDITS (NOT SCREENING)
I have screened rough cut elements in various of stages throughout as well as to my MA peers and their feedback was a real help to crafting the final version. They were not surprisingly similar to the feedback from my MA peers from the crits we had. Some points are outlined below.

• They loved the bits of the boys together as did I so more of this was added.
• Liked the newer additions of the boys questioning each other and responses.
• Short and sweet on the views of others was liked best in - make their points - then out.
• The three screens of the same son also went down well and added another dimension.
• They liked the boys simply just being on the screen Those with kids recognised traits of their own, they realised that they were playing a little for the camera at times but added some entertainment and fun. They also pointed out that as two of them looked very similar Jacob and Noah their poses and body language helped through watching to tell them appart.
• The MES worked well with the plain black background
• Sound was generally good but a few minor issues were pointed out over levels.
• Most did not really notice the difference between the images in terms of lighting, so did not see the need for grading. When I did point it out they did then notice but it did not bother most of them. The only people who did pull me up on it were a couple of media teachers and editors.
• The feedback from no real explanation as to the messages, values and ideology generally hit the nail on the head. There was enough mention to get the teachers dues to mention of class, school etc. Most of the audience pieced together the duality of voices of myself and my wife as the parents. The Psychologists was not as successful but generally most did get that it was an experts voice due the tonality of it and distancing language used "first born child" etc.
• The title siblings 11-10-8 worked well and did frame the piece. Some confusion over if it may be a date but made sense once explained it was the boys ages at the time of recording and could be a series re-visited in 10 years then being 21-20-18.

LAYING OFF THE FOOTAGE

Due to editing the footage on three separate tracks one for each screen NOT son the process was not too complicated. It simply involved exporting each track individually. I did have to go through each track once separated with a fine tooth-comb to alienate any sound or picture issues which took a lot of time but it did work well.

PREPARING FOOTAGE TO BE SCREENED
The issue here was if I would have been able to 100% bang on synch all of the footage from the projectors together so they would be exact. Time, technical and financial limitations means that on this screening that this will not be the case. From my experiments trying this out a half second delay between screens could be encountered so I added this gap during my edits. Further experiments with MIDI, SDS and bluetooth may bear fruit but for this exhibition for my tutors are simply not going to happen. For this reason I added a little more of a pause between comments were I could and they were shot single scree. Also where the boys were recorded three camera and the sound from one spilled into one another I went in and cleaned it out. This was so if it did not synch super close the voices would not overlap or seem too weird.