Saturday, 11 May 2019

PRODUCTION: ROUGH CUT



This is my first full assembly of the edit. Using Jemma's newest script really helped me put together the story but it's also helped me see sections which do and don't work. However, prior to making changes I let Victoria and Jemma view the footage and give me their feedback (I'll go into that later on)

When opening the project, Jemma had noted a montage of footage from the performances but when asking her about what footage I could use we came to the choice not to actually use any of the actual performance shots, rather use footage of them either in Drag and about to perform or getting into Drag. Jemma was also very clear on what music she wanted to use, the track in the intro is a edited version of a song 'Neon Lights' which Jemma edited together as she knew how she wanted it to flow, I simply gave her the timing for the intro and title sequence which I worked out to be 27 seconds, 10 seconds for the introduction with voice over and 17 seconds for the title sequence. 

I haven't edited a version of the titles yet as I'm still assembiling the edit itself. I added in a temporary colour matte with the correct timing for the title sequence. I've done the same for some of the archive footage/photos that we don't get have. Most of the archives we've obtained now after me and Jemma sat down and went through Tanya, Conor and Amy's Instagrams as we were told by Victoria we'd been given permission to use anything from them by our contributors.

Tanya:
We needed to find photos of Tanya from her early stages of drag when it was more make up looks (a couple of examples below):


These and then more recent photos where Tanya's look as Miss Zodi has developed. Tanya also says in one of their interviews:
"I guess you never really know what Miss Zodi's gonna pull out of the bag, like it could be something so nice and like pretty and soft and then next it'll be horror and blood pouring out of everywhere" (Tanya Hale)
So Jemma wanted to see a variety of looks, quite literally what Tanya says, soft and nice looks and then bloody and horror looks and we found these photos for that:




So we can see the difference that Miss Zodi has with her looks. In the edit I enlarged each photo and blurred it so that each photo had a nice background and cross faded the between then all. This was so they were more appealing to view and easier to focus on the photo as well. We'd also been given Tanya's live stream but from their phones recording so we could show what Tanya's audience were watching when they tuned into the live stream so I mixed this in with the opening footage so it was clear that she was doing a live stream.


Once this had been done I mixed together the cut aways of Tanya's room (wig, make-up, art, etc) to give more information about Tanya and show what they do for their drag looks. From 3:53 the edit goes back to Tanya and here is where more of the cuts are clear. What's helpful is that the shot changes work really well for the edit giving a different range of shots and bringing us in closer to the information that Tanya's talking about. Here is where I need to speak to Jemma about what coverage to put here as I don't want it to be just any footage, it needs to make sense but I need to also see if Jemma wants to see any of these cuts as because the shot changes we could get away with it.

9:16 is where the interview with Tanya and Pete Hale (their Father) is brought in and here we'll need some more archive, Victoria has told me that we're awaiting a video which is getting sent over from Tanya which is of her first performance. At the end of this interview, Jemma asked to put in a piece of extra footage which we got while shooting which was Pete coming into Tanya's room and seeing the new look that Tanya did for the live stream and we see Pete's reaction.



This was a really nice way to show how much Pete supports Tanya with their Drag life. We hear Pete talking about how he's opened up to this new world and how he finds Drag a talent and an art but then seeing the actuality footage of him seeing Tanya's look and the amazement on his face works so well for the story. 

The final part with Tanya's interview (before we get to the live event) is when Tanya talks about the online presence that Miss Zodi has and then talks about when one of their photos for 'Face tuned' not long ago, lucky for us the photo that was face tuned was one that I'd actually taken of Tanya when we all first met so the copyright was in our name:




Conor:

With Conor's sections, it was more actuality footage than archive, this was noted in the script to bring in the archive of Conor as Sapphire Stonee until later where he talks more about the new style of Drag and peoples opinions of Drag. Prior to this I put together the first part with Conor's interview and as you can see from the screenshot below, the footage is VERY orange:



While filming this footage we had very orange lighting in Conor's house due to the bulbs he uses so this wasn't very avoidable even after white balancing so this footage I'll need to work on once we get into the grade.
But for the actual assembly, the issue I had was that while Conor talks about his style, work, what his old job was like, I have VERY little footage as the only relevant footage I have is Conor styling the wig because we couldn't film him at the Salon he works at. We also don't have Conor getting into Drag until the Live Event footage for Miss Drag UK but Jemma doesn't want this footage to be shown until we're at the Pageant.

From 6:25 Jemma asked to bring in some of the tracking footage of Conor and his Drag room as we were beginning to run out of relevant footage and this does work well. I removed the sound from this as we have Conor's interview over and also cut back to the interview before we actually saw Conor start to speak so we didn't have the footage looking like it's out of sync.

Here we brought in the archive of Sapphire Stonee, when looking through Sapphire's instagram I was looking for photos that show how high fashioned Sapphire is as Conor is the "traditional" style of drag:



I found these showed how much effort Conor puts into his drag but also the different styles. As I did with Tanya's archive I put the photo behind and blurred it.

Amy:

Amy's interview proved to be the most difficult to cut as Amy doesn't really pause to take a breath and talks quite quickly so finding a point to cut proved difficult, it was also hard for sections where I needed to end and move on where I'd cut Amy because you could tell she'd been cut off unless it was actually the end of a sentence.

Very quickly into this rough cut, I realised that Amy's interviews will need a lot of archive photos/footage to cover the cuts as we don't have any footage we got of Amy in drag or even doing anything as we could only get her on the one day for the interview. I found we're allowed to use photos from Amy's personal instagram and Sink the Pink's:





Jemma is currently looking through to find more photos which she thinks are relevant while I continue editing.

Throughout the interviews I also did some basic audio editing, but matching up the channels. With each interview, I recorded the interviewee's audio through a clip mic and connected that to one channel and then had a shotgun microphone recording back-up audio into the other channel. I listened through to the audio from both channels and when decided which sounded better I simply removed the other channel and duplicated the clean audio so it was all balanced.

When it came to creating the montages for the performances, Jemma said she wanted to see a bit of everyone from Blackburn but the focus is obviously Tanya as Miss Zodi, here I put in the music in so I could cut the sequence together. I did the same for the Pageant but Jemma explained that here we want to see more of Conor and his friend Victoria Carriage but a few mixtures of the other performers through the wide shots. When I added in the interviews from the organisers I needed to add in a another couple of shots to hide the cuts as this interview is only one shot. 

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