My most “intensively edited” film
You may be wondering what makes my film “intensively edited.” Well, let me start by telling you the journey of making my latest short film, The Nice Girl.
It all started at the start of 2021, after the hype of making my first two short films for Digi60. I was eager to make more short films and I had an idea for a story about a woman with a double sided personality. I really wanted to portray a character that would be nice and innocent but would later turn dark and evil. So, I started writing a script and I really wanted to include a mirror aspect into the story. That’s when the idea of “the reflection” came to mind. I had a lot of fun writing the dialogue, especially because it was based on real experiences that I’m sure not only I have had. The dialogue between Martina and Alice is a conversation that I’m sure anybody with a “frenemy” has had. After I was done writing the script, I reached out to a couple of cinematographers to see if they would like to help out. I had some bites, but unfortunately that’s when COVID hit hard and we went into a 5 month lockdown. All my plans for this film were put on hold until further notice.
Summer came around and I was making other short films for the Weekly Film Challenges. I had collaborated with Vincent Valentino a few times for his own short films and he had offered to help out on anything I had in the works. That’s when I thought of finally bringing my script from January to life. I didn’t know who to cast for the role of Martina, so I told him we could just film the “reflection” scene so I could use that for my acting demo reel. We shot that scene at his place with the help of my fellow filmmaker friend, Marie-France. It was tough having to act out the intense scene by myself since I had no one else to act off of. I was also feeling a bit sick that day, which didn’t help. After a few hours of filming, we were wrapped and I was happy to have finally filmed this little scene for my demo reel. But a part of me really wanted the rest of the scenes to be filmed. I was moving away to Toronto by this time and I didn’t have time to shoot anything else, let alone find a co-star. But then I met this girl named Rachel on another production and she was perfect for the role of Martina! I cast her right away, but we were never able to find a time to shoot. I had moved away to Toronto at this point and each time I came back to Ottawa, our schedules never lined up. Finally, I came back again to Ottawa for Christmas break and we finally found a time that worked for each one of us. Vincent was on board again as cinematographer and we ended up shooting in the parking garage of his apartment. The location was originally set in a park, but I had to change it since it was no longer summer and shooting in a park at night during winter would be brutal. But the parking garage ended up being the perfect setting! As expected, Rachel portrayed Martina perfectly and we managed to shoot everything in under 2 hours. It was the most efficient shoot I’d ever done. Now that meant I finally had all my shots and I could put this film all together.
Post-production was put on hold for about a month because I was busy living life in the Netherlands (again) and attending school virtually. I was also secretly dreading having to edit everything since there was so much footage to go through. But I finally got to work one day in my cozy little flat in Delft. The editing process was quite intricate for me this time around. I had been learning so much from my Post-Production program, especially in Avid Media Composer, so I decided to start off with that to sync all my clips and organize them in bins. I ended up making the rough cut in Avid and even picture lock. My teachers would be proud (and my classmates thought I was crazy yet brave to willingly use Avid for my own projects haha).
Next came time for sound mixing and I figured I would do that in Pro Tools since I had learned a lot of skills from the previous semester. I’m not continuing with Sound editing this semester, but I still enjoy dabbling in it. The film needed a lot of sound editing since we had filmed in a very echoey parking garage. The Equalizer tool was definitely my best friend throughout this process. It still isn’t perfect, but the audio does sound better compared to before. After fixing the dialogue audio, I had to find some good music to go with the film. Our sound class gave us access to Soundly last semester so I found a lot of good “horror” ambient sounds to use as background music. After many days of sound designing and mixing, I was ready for the next step - colour grading!
This semester of Post-Production has got us learning about colour grading in DaVinci Resolve. It was my first time using this program so I had a lot of fun experimenting with the colour wheels to try to get the picture well graded. I still have a lot to learn but I probably found colour grading the most relaxing and enjoyable process out of all of them. Feels good when you can compare the clips side by side and see the “before” and “after” shots.
Finally, after colour grading was done, I brought my project back to my comfort zone - Adobe Premiere Pro. That’s where I added the finishing touches, such as credits and title card. I even added a little bit of effects and touched up the colours. In total, I think I have about 5 different exports of my project: the rough cut, picture lock, audio mixed, colour corrected and the deliverable.
So this is why I’m calling this my “intensively edited” film. It was my biggest challenge as an editor so far, but I’m starting to get the hang of it and eager to do more with these editing programs. My film isn’t perfect, but I got it to a much better place than it was before. That’s the beauty of editing!
Here is the final cut of my film The Nice Girl.