Video Reflection:

One of the recent exercises we had been tasked with was a sequence which would show us making our bed in a roughly 30-40 seconds. For this exercise I wanted to go the opposite route of my previous exercise in terms of shot quantity and make my sequence as simple as possible. This meant that I had decided to only use one shot. There were many ways I could go about editing this sequence, I could take the footage and edit it into only showing highlighted key moments, I could have used zoom in’s, at some point I considered of just cutting together using the sounds as the transition points. Instead of these concepts I had decided to choose something simpler. Inspired by montage sequences in many YouTube videos and films that follow construction I decided to do a rapid time lapse. This meant that I could use the one take and it didn’t matter if I made small mistakes when filming, as long as everything was in frame and the shot composition was good the image would look alright. I decided to not use a time-lapse mode on my phone when recording as I wanted to learn how to do this in editing, plus this would mean that I had a lot of freedom of how fast the video would appear in relation to the run time. This was not a complex edit and I managed to figure it out with relative ease and a bit of googling. However even after the visuals were taken care of one thing still needed work, the sound. The main issue was once the video was compressed into a time lapse the sound was ruined, so much like the time-lapses seen on television and YouTube I had decided to use music. I selected some fast, high energy jazz music to give the video some sense of fun and speed. Overall, I really enjoyed making this short video, I got the chance to make something I’ve never done before and learn new editing tools. I very much enjoyed the project.

Scene Deconstruction:

For my scene deconstruction I have decided to take a look at the paperwork scene from Hot Fuzz. In this scene the protagonist has to process a group of underaged drinkers at the local police station. Edger Wright when making the film Hot Fuzz wanted to parody the action cop genre through the lens of a small English country town cop film and this is most apparent in this scene. In order to replicate the intensity of the police action style the scene uses fast cuts with harsh transition effects between each shot. The framing and composition are constantly changing zooming in an out never lingering on a single shot for more than 5 seconds, replicating the action films at the time (just in a mundane setting). The use of sound effects to heavily emphasise things such as the flashing of the camera and the scribbling of a pen on paper (a common trope of an Edger Wright film). The sound effects are used as well with the transition between each cut making the scene very energetic. This coupled with the use of a rock song makes the harsh nature of the scene come full circle. The small amount of dialogue also is a great showcase of how the action cop genre is being injected into the setting as when the protagonist meets the police officer already inside the station he is calm and cheery, whilst the protagonist is very self-serious. When the protagonist is asked “do you really want to process the lot, my pens running dry?” he replies with a over the top “not a problem” as he whips out two pens and clicks them together. All this is done to create a comedic effect as it attempts to make the simple process of taking pictures and filing paperwork seem “cool” despite the events that are being depicted in actuality being rather boring. This style is shown throughout the rest of the film and the scene is also continued at the end of the film. This scene was actually praised by real police officers as it reflected elements of police work that is not normally shown in cop films. Whilst this is a short scene of the film it is an excellent showcase of the style of film it is parodying, as films that exist within the action cop genre would never have a scene like this especially not in this style.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7k6byT5Sn8k&t=1s

Colour Grading:

For the colour grading I had decided to work on my making the bed sequence. For this I decided to attempt 3 different styles of colour grading. The first edit features high amounts of colour saturation to brighten up the image. This not only makes the sequences appear more bighter, but it also adds vibrancy to the image, this can be seen with how certain colours such as blue become more distinguish. I can see how this can be done to create more striking images but also how to take something seemingly more mundane and give it more character. The second edit is a greyscale version of the sequence, I had decided to try this because I was curious how experimenting with the sharpness of the image and how to effect it with it in black and white. This makes the image of course look far more simplistic but its clear how its use can be to add character and create a stylistic appearance. The third edit used a lot of sharpening and playing with the hue tool to create a green matrix filter effect. This strange appearance did in my opinion contrast with the content of the video itself however I did find this interesting as adding a strong tint of varying colours can clearly alter the feeling of the video. I would probably apply this sort of colour grading to something more serious in tone rather than a light-hearted sequence such as this. If I was to select one of these colour grading variations it would be version 1. This is due to its subtle changes to the picture to make the images more vibrant and fun, which suits the sequence well. Also, the other two edits clash with the tone of the video making them more distracting than anything.

Examples of the three colour grading variations can be found below