Tag: Post Production

Flying Blind

I’m very excited for today’s release of ‘Flying Blind’. Over the summer of 2017, I worked with an incredibly talented post production team at Billy Graham to assemble what I believe is a very powerful short film designed to encourage Christians to take their seemingly small decisions and actions more seriously. The program features four heartfelt true stories plus an allegorical illustration designed to support the overall theme of the program as well as Franklin Graham’s message.

Every single person involved in this project put great care and many hours of prayer into every single aspect of this piece. I’m really proud to see this level of writing (and re-writing), shooting, acting, musical score, art direction, visual effects, editing, color grading, and marketing.

My specific role was editing the story segments alongside Tyler Garnett who post-produced each segment. In addition, I color graded the entire piece and got to dust off my composition skills to enhance the score for the opening segment – everything from the first note through the opening title. The trippy, dark synths and top melody line (unashamedly influenced by ‘Stranger Things‘ and reminiscent of 80’s film scores) are my additions to an existing underscore.

Larissa Miller, full-time at BGEA, produced the airplane segments with Evan Vetter editing. Micah Bomgaars, full-time at BGEA, was senior producer, overseeing the entire production of the program.

This piece truly has the potential to help stir a spiritual awakening within the church, which in turn can really minister to a hurting world. Please watch and then share with anyone you can. BGEA has a Flying Blind landing page with information for ordering a free DVD and discipleship resources. Thanks for reading and watching!

 

FCPX Editing Tip – maximizing the timeline index for cutting A-Roll

Screenshot 2014-01-30 00.02.40

I’m logging nearly 4 hours of interviews and here is my workflow.

Once my interviews are synced and organized in the browser, I choose to string them out in a Project rather than logging in the browser. I like being able to zoom in and out more precisely and trim out the ‘fluff’ as I go. In this project I have a 2 camera multicam clip set up as well, but I do this even on single camera interviews.

I usually play the interview at double speed, slowing down for key portions. I really like the fast scrubbing in FCPX. I think it is the most clearly understandable of the other NLEs I’ve used (AVID, Premiere and FCP7), even when music is added to the mix. When I hit a key word or a laugh or something worth marking, I create a marker (m key) then hit m again and write a note of what they said. I go through the whole set of interviews then build a great timeline index for quickly searching words or phrases. The big standout bites, I’ll mark with an asterix * then easily filter the timeline index in the search field. The timeline index will scroll along as I’m playing back and also allows me to jump to the point I’ve marked by simply clicking on a marker in the index.

Once logging the A-Roll is complete, I duplicate the Project, rename it, and whittle away at the edit. Markers stick around on soundbites I use and I have my logging Project to refer to as my source. I know this is nothing ground-breaking. It’s probably what a lot of people do, but it is very effective for me in crafting the A-Roll of unscripted projects. It is perfect when working with a producer and we’re hunting for a particular quote or topic.

One other cool function of FCPX is its built-in integration with the OSX dictionary. Right-click on any word and you can check spelling, look up definitions and even check a thesaurus. P.S. – I do know how to spell ‘migraine’, I intentionally misspelled it for the screen grab.

I would love to see Apple add some more advanced features in the timeline index such as speech recognition and script import/syncing. It’s not a big stretch of the imagination to see it fitting very nicely in the current layout.

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