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College student looking for advice for Editor Demo Reel!
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Hi Andrew,
just to add up on what is already good advice…
Your sound comes in with a straight cut and is kind of jarring. You could use a short audio fade in. A few frames might do the trick, try different lengths and see which one you like.
The New Urban Arts titles are way too long. They break the rhythm between the two shots.
Some foley would help also. I miss the sound of the guy lying down and also some ominous footsteps from the guy with the knife. I can hear some on the live sound but they lack weight. You could carry them on to the second title.
I believe I saw some kind of hose attached to the wrist of the guy with the knife. If you’re able to erase it it would be a good thing to showcase at the end.
The sound of the knife is kind of bland. A more tearing/breaking kind of sound would be good. You could also add breathing and grunting sounds for both of them, especially at the end when the guy looks at the liver. The music is also a little too loud at times.
At 1.10, right before “I gotta go” I can hear the reverb of another word. I also see the end of a hand gesture from the actor.
I would overlap the end of “a cup of coffee” on the girl instead of cutting right before she talks. I think the dialogue is too much in favor of the guy, I’d like to see a reaction from the girl. I’d also loose the gesture after “I’ve seen too many of those” as it doesn’t look natural. You could squeeze in a shot of the girl there.
I´d also tweak the color grading on both scenes a little and think of another way to show it off, such as a horizontal split or a repetition of the guy’s face. The left of the shot is the back of her head and the difference isn’t really that obvious. It will be easier to notice on the face.
I don’t know how much of this is feasible with your footage, gear and whatever other constraints you might have. Everybody’s a critic when it comes to editing. It’s fun to play the critic every once in a while though 😉
Cheers.
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Magnolia’s audio is still too hollow. Any chance you can get the actors to come in and loop just these parts? That’s the ultimate “fix”, and pretty common in the biz. If you can do some great lip sync on the looping, it would demonstrate strong editing skill. Once again, the director and audio man on the set should get a slap for letting this happen in the first place, they saved a buck and a couple minutes on the set, only to blow hours in post repair.
When it comes to audio repair, I’m not as good as someone who does it every day. I’m not as scientific at it as I should be: I tend to throw random plug-ins at it until I like what it sounds like. I dunno, maybe some downwards expansion on the higher frequencies? The room is too reverberant and “live”. I think adding more ambient street noise or a continuous low-level “rhubarb” of dispatch gabble over the cop’s radio, might help, kind of in the way the pine tree air “freshener” improves a car interior that really needs the carpets deodorized. Anyhow, it’s more realistic.
Also, that scene where the woman is backlit; horribly blown-out, and contrast ratios are all over the map, still. If it was me, I would play with additional layers and some masks to bring her up out of the mud and knock the blown-out window down a little.
Do you have the raw footage to re-cut the scene? When they stand up out of frame I’d cut out of that sooner and match to the next shot better. The actor’s performance timing is laggy; if you have reversals, you can speed up the exchange and add the woman’s reacting back in at the same time, using her cut-away.
I like the before/after demos, I would put a hard dividing line thru the split to make it more obvious. The lower-third info is obscured there for a short bit where it’
where it is white-on-white. -
On the split-screen; wipe the split in and stop it in the center for a few beats, then finish wiping it across to reveal the corrected version full-screen for longer. And make the dividing line visible, as I said before.
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Hello again!
I’ve taken some time off to work on some other projects and have just finished revisiting this reel. I totally redid the audio for Magnolia, as well as remixed Deliverance a bit and I’ve made some video edits to both. The editing breakdown now has a wipe that reveals more, too. I’ve done my best with the backlit Magnolia shot and am afraid I’ve coaxed it out as best I could. Renato mentioned a hose in the killer’s sleeve, but it is just the cuff of his shirt.
Please let me know if you think anything else major should be changed, but thanks to both of you I feel a lot better about it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbblEuI7gJ4
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Audio WAY improved, but that backlighting remains a problem. Roto-mask the girl and bump her up, while lowering the BG some more, and I think you’ve got something. Stick the contact info slate up at the end also. Artists sign their work.
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The audio and the reediting are a big improvement, so is the split screen. Like Mark says, if you can do something for the backlit shot of the girl it would be great and also very nice for the showcase.
Congratulations and good luck.
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When it’s blown out to white, there is no detail left in the white areas to retrieve, is his problem now. Again, the guys shooting this at the time need a slap upside the head for missing this when it was easy to fix on location.
I threw a still from that scene into photoshop, split the lady into her own layer, and separated the room behind her into a layer with the door frame as boundary. Turned off the back layers and her layer looks pretty well-exposed now. But how to fix the room behind her? If there was a still of the room available from another scene, a good compositor could use a track matte to replace the blown-out background with a better-exposed version of the room, with the actress layered over the top of that. Even then, it still might look “funny” unless all the perspectives match up.
Yes, you can often “fix it in post”, but in this case, it will cost much more time and money than doing one more take on location with attention paid to overall exposure.
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Hey guys,
Here is what I hope is the last installment. I spent several hours roto-masking the woman and I think I was able to bring her up enough as well as bring out what detail remained in the overexposed window. After all that work, I’ll definitely give the director a slap, Mark! I’d love to hear your thoughts, since I feel I have made as close to a definitive version of that scene as I could.
(still processing as of 1:30 AM EST)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMkLgyGnnJI -
Bravo! A clear before and after distinction now, with key skills demonstrated. You have what I think is an effective demo now. It shows that you have some grasp of the tools and how to achieve a desired result.
I think a person learns more from repairing what is broken, than from just playing with perfect things. You get more insight into the internal workings with flawed materials that must be repaired. As well, you appreciate a thing more, the more of yourself you put into it. That’s the extra rush a pilot gets from flying a plane he built himself, where he knows, intimately, every bolt and wire and piece of metal, and he knows it was his skill that put it all together into something that’s carrying him a mile high and keeping him alive.
Good, now go out there and knock on those doors.
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Mark’s right. Definite improvement.
I hope this helps to open doors for you.
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