Editing and Final Exports! IT'S FINISHED!

Hello and sorry for the delay in posting it has been a massively stressful and busy period these past few weeks!

But, on the absolutely fantastically positive side, I HAVE FINISHED THE FINAL EXPORT OF THE FILM AND IT IS 100% COMPLETE!!!! :)

I am ABSOLUTELY over the moon with the final piece but here I will explain the monstrous journey it took to get here!

Editing itself wasn’t too hard as I was able to use my expertise if you can call it that with playing drums to move pieces into the right tempo etc. but the main thing was getting the visual to sync up correctly with the audio when I had to manipulate pieces.

This was VERY stressful as having to hear something so repetitive as the guitar sound over and over and over again was a task like no other! What began to happen was the visual was all lined up perfectly and looks great, almost the final cut for the visual I reckon. But the problem was the audio and drums went in and out of tempo due to the timings of them being shot etc. so I had to spend a lot of time cutting the drum audio and recorded drum track in the environment to fix this problem and make it smoothly play. I had to do this for most of the piece as bits and bobs had higher and lower volumes on the video and so I essentially re-mixed the song as a proper song, and then added the visual to put it all in sync again.

As you can imagine, this was pretty much double the amount of work as I made the piece twice technically but never the less once it was done it was the most wonderful feeling to know it was sorted.

But as with everything there is always room for improvement, but staying your hand is a wise move too. I say this because as I exported it for the final time, as I viewed the video in Full Screen Mode, I noticed that as the CD player is turned on, the music plays but in the next clip the CD isn’t moving.

The horrible moment when your stomach lurches is exactly what happened at this moment as this was luckily noticed very close to the deadline.

So once again I went back into Final Cut Pro and had to re-edit my perfect order/mix to accommodate this continuity error.

This took longer again and once it was fixed, I re-exported it and realised it was still 2 seconds out!

So repeated the fixing process, exported again and it didn’t work again!

This carried on until 8^th time lucky It was fixed properly, no continuity errors for this part, no glitches just smooth edited movement from one scene to the next and at last I slept.

I still cannot get over how long this took and overall in this project I’ve realised I REALLY need to organise and plan much more than I already am because this was cutting it too close for comfort.

Never the less. IT. IS. DONE. And I am exceptionally proud of the end result. :)

That’s it for now until the actual exhibition. Unfortunately having left this so late/been unprepared in too many parts I haven’t had time to create my idea of a mini marble run turning on the TV and playing my film.

So for the exhibition I will be now be showing this on the show reel, hence the titles at the beginning instead of just starting as I’d first thought of doing once the marble hit the “Play” button.

I’ve also added Jazz influenced music and text to hype up the piece and then the viewer come to find that the film is not as epic as the music and text make it out to be. This all adds into the tongue in cheek science experiment feel of it all, along with the title I have finally decided on with help from friends and family, which is:

“Professor Marble and His Music Machine”.

I worked with a lot of titles for this piece such as “Marble Run Music” and “Music, Marbles and Machinery” but this one I find sums up the playfulness of the piece as well as retaining a scientific feeling to it. :)

So that’s it for this post but check back soon for my final sign off for this project and a link to the final piece on my Vimeo plus find out how the exhibition went (although technically this is after the deadline I hope you won’t mind!). :)

Take care,

Joe.