Subtitles of the Movie

Another way you can add production value is by getting an actual steady-cam and that may be easier said than done. I understand that, but generally in your town, if you ask around or call around they'll be someone with a steady-cam who's willing to donate half a day, maybe a day to get something on their reel or you can build your own steady-cams or steady-cams you can get now for relatively cheap. So if you just get a few shots is what I'm trying to say. You don't have to have a steady-cam operator for the entire shoot, but if you get a few shots with steady-cam, boy, you can go a long way in raising that production value. So in this last little sequence here, I tried to at least make it seem like the actual filmmaker knew what the heck he was doing and so we combined steady-cam with slow-mo. That actually is another final cut edit where that was shot actually upside down to get that low angle and that also mirrors a shot earlier on as well, as these people, these two characters literally started their journey, so they're kind of ending their journey here. So that's what the shot is supposed to convey and planning out your shots, that's cheap so you can get production value out of simply thinking about what you want to say with your film and then designing shots that will help you say those things. So again, it's not a real hit you on the head thing, but again, we bookended this scene with something that was earlier. These two characters walking in and starting their journey together to try to follow their passions and their dreams and it end up blowing up, of course, and succeeding in a most unexpected way. So slow-mo, steady-cam, combine the two and we've got production value. Even again, we're shooting, I think it was a Sunday afternoon when that TV set, and it's just a small, local TV set wasn't being used by anybody but we were fortunate enough to get access to that studio. We got a few friends and people and neighbors into the set and we just shot it in a way that we just said point the camera at the ceiling as much as you can, just get lights in the background, get some shots in depth. It also distracts people from realizing that they're walking into an almost utterly empty studio. So with the slow-mo, with the camera angle, with the steady-cam and then by modifying the slow-mo so we actually speed it back up to real time here as they do the potato, like that. You can see it was a small studio audience that was and again, I brought in that text right there immediately to kind of fill that space and also to say, you know, by the way, that also pays off earlier on. There's another, he starts his first addressing of a crowd, he's at a hotel room where he's trying to address this crowd and their seating capacity is 34. So at any rate, that was also set up earlier in the piece as well. So try to fill that space, the text flies in like that. So you're kind of distracted visually, that don't look right there, there's no one there. I couldn't put enough people there and there's also not enough risers and chairs to make that look like it was filled with actual people, so I just did it with what I had available, which was text. So by flying in the text, you're kind of just distracted for long enough so that you don't really pay attention to, at least on the first viewing, of course I'm telling you now to look at it, but as you look through this, you're like, you don't really notice that that studio's just virtually empty. So that's the reality show that he's shooting. The steady-cam does the rounds and then right as we're about to go back so that we have a camera, camera, producer, camera, woman there and right as we're about to focus once again on the fact that I've got, like, eight or ten extras on set to be the studio audience, I just go into close-ups of the studio audience themselves. So by cutting back and forth between that, I kind of fool people into thinking there might just be several people and also by shooting like people's heads in the foreground and then people in the background by staging people like this, it looks like again there might be, you know two dozen people there instead of less than a dozen. So at any rate, that's how you can do that. That's not really so much of an editing technique, although certainly some of that has to do with editing. Some of it has to do with direction, but it can also have to do with the choice of shot composition for you as an editor and your use of where to cut in on a shot rather than cut in on the shot earlier on where again, if you were to stop this and analyze it, you can count the number of people and we were even using people's kids to try to fill up this space as much as possible. But just by being clever about not dwelling on that for too long, so we're squooshing by and now we fill that in with text, you may not notice that's in, I don't think people do when they first see it. So those are again just some editing techniques that I want to pass along. Hopefully you can use them. It's certainly been a lot of fun bringing you these techniques. Eight techniques, seven and a half, however you want to count it for better editing of your project.