TVC - post 11

My, how time flies!!!

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My last post about editing the TVC was very hopeful. There's something lovely and exciting and hopeful about the initial rough cut of a project. ll the problems are blatantly obvious, but the individual disparate shots begin to be shaped into a story for the first time ever. Every hiccup in the cut is part of its beauty. "It's fine, it's only a rough cut. Imagine what it will be like when we've trimmed it all properly and got a good sound mix on there!"

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From the rough cut of my TVC it has mostly been downhill. All of the loveable issues of the rough cut have shown themselves to be much much more difficult to solve than first thought, and a good sound mix has been an elusive beast, and very difficult to tame.

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Unfortunately Sima said no to cutting out the city part of the ad and we ended up spending a huge chunk of our editing time trying different options for the transition from city to forest. Finally we have a transition that is far less jarring than any others we tried, but I still don't feel that it totally works for the ad. We've also spent a lot of time playing with different music options, and the placement of the music within the ad. The mood of the voiceover has been tricky too; the voiceover as it was written was too long for the ad, and has to be very rushed to squish it all in. We've cut out some phrases and played around with the timing, and have managed to improve it greatly, however I would rather take it out completely as I think it is a pure distraction from the images, which tell us everything we need to know anyway. The problem with this is that the structure of the end dialogue (which begins with the word "so") is slightly jarring without the voiceover, and I would also have to run the idea past Sima, as it is quite a big departure from the scripted ad. Fortunately I do have some more time in post-sound to work with Michael and make it work. I think I might end up trying to cut out almost all of the voiceover, and leave only a phrase or two, possibly with an echo effect added.

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The other issue at the moment is the graphic at the end of the ad. I had wanted to include a fern frond in the logo for "Life Cycle", however I couldn't find one that had already been simply drawn, only actual photographs, and I'm not skilled enough with my graphic software to draw one myself from scratch. I tried various effects on the best photograph I found to try use the frond in my logo, and then tried to incorporate it into the text as the "C" for "Cycle", however in order to match the look of the text to the look of the frond I gave it a three-dimensional illusion look, and made it quite bright. Sadly, the effect of this was to make the logo look quite gaudy; much like a heading I might have used for a school project five years ago. It simply looked terribly unfashionable and did not match the simple elegance of the other imagery. Anyway, I was too slow to replace it. I prepared some new graphics (much simpler, more elegant) last night and went in to meet Toetu today to put it in, only to discover that Glenn had already done outputs ready for colour grading at Digipost tomorrow. Noooooo!!!!! I was so disappointed. Fortunately it is probably solvable. After the colour grade we will put it back into Avid, rewrite over the last shot and graphic, and use the graded shot from the previous copy as a reference to colour grade the final shot in the Avid. It's a bit of a mission but it will be worth it to save face!!!