Night Journey: Final Cut

Whilst working on this project I saved the project files with the days that I was working on the project in the title.  For example; Night Journey Rough Cut WEDNESDAY, Night Journey Rough Cut THURSDAY AFTERNOON.  I did this so that should anything happen to me and somebody else had to take over the project, it would be immediately recognisable as to which was the latest version and when I had last worked on it.  I thought that this might be useful as sometimes a copy saved on the mac, or the network might not have been deleted and there may be another copy elsewhere, for example, on an external hard drive which is more progressed.  This was just a quick system for me to know which was the version that should be worked on. 

After I was happy with the arrangement of clips in the rough cut and knew what atmos tracks I was going to use, and where, I compiled my final cut.  I set this up as a new sequence, saved from the rough cut, and added the new atmos track, the dialogue clips (split where necessary for pacing) and cropped and replaced the subclips where I felt it was needed.

I tweeked the subclips and audio to make them run together perfectly, I added the additional sounds that I had decided on, such as trains going over bridges and level crossing alarms, and then I adjusted the sound levels accordingly to make the audio seem natural for the position that the viewer is placed in, for example, trackside or in the corridor of the moving train, which would sound different to the inner carriage.

I watched the film through several times and tweeked subclips and audio levels where I thought appropriate.
I am very proud of the work that I put into this film, the consideration that I gave to the visuals, the audio and the continuity, and I am proud of the final product overall.  There were a couple of shots in the film that I wasn't 100% sure about but decided to keep them in.  The first was the cut away from the guard entering the carriage to the corridor, I wasn't sure that that worked but I was also unsure as to whether not cutting away would have meant that the guard scene was too long.  The other clip I was unsure about using was the external shot of the train going over the short bridge.  I wanted to show that the train was travelling a long way (and therefore show a passing of much time) to account for the traveller who didn't want to fall asleep, falling asleep.  But I wasn't 100% sure as to whether it was one external train shot too many, and whether by putting in another cut away shot would actually make it too eventful and take away the drowsy feeling that I wanted to get over.

All in all I really enjoyed working on this project.  I liked doing all the preparation as this made the assembly stages so much easier, and I'm pleased that I took time to get to grips with all the footage, dialogue and audio tracks so that I could visualise how they would all fit together.