As I knew I was going to be very busy with the Debbie edit, I wanted to make sure the animation for Anxiety Dance would have sufficient attention. To assist Shahid with animating the branches, I created a (very loose) instruction manual that included everything I wanted to achieve from the animation, alongside diagrams and descriptions that I drew in Photoshop of how I envisioned the branches' movement and style. Although, I did make it clear that this was only for Shahid to follow as a rough guide, and if he figured in the process that things worked better done in a different way, I was happy for him to make those changes. Here are my descriptions : 

The animation still took a lot longer than expected, and as I hadn’t scheduled in that I would be animating for Qualia, some time from Through the Medium got taken away unfortunately, which pushed us back quite a bit after final edit was finished. It was also a race to get a rough version of the branches done for Lucy in order to do the sound design for the piece, which added quite a lot of stress. However, I’m glad that the situation did occur, as now my confidence has grown a lot in using software such as After Effects.

Due to the hot conditions of our room during the stop motion shoot it meant our character and set would often melt, and time had to be spent fixing this every so often, for continuity purposes as we didn't shoot the scenes in a linear manner. However, there was only so much we could do to get it looking similar throughout, so we thought to assist this we would fix things up ever so slightly in post. This was a really subtle thing, done only on shots that had patches that were really messed up and required a bit of fixing. I wanted to make sure Clay's textured skin was still on show though, and the indentations and changes as an effect of us touching / moving him could still be visible in order to contrast with the very smooth CGI universe. 

To do this I used NukeX, using the blur tool. This allowed me to focus on only particular areas that needed attention, and change the opacity of the blur to low so as the smoothing was very slight. I'd never used NukeX before, so this was a learning experience for me and I now feel more confident using the software. 

My Role Experience

For me, as an editor, the production stage was a lot about observing the footage in real time in order to understand the story and shots better, developing a familiarity with these to assist in the editing stages of post production. I would frequently look back and forth between the monitor featuring the camera view and the live action happening on the set. This was in order to establish a relationship between what the camera was capturing and any details that were not within the frame that could be useful knowledge to also later assist me, when choosing certain takes or angles over one another. 

In between shooting, my job was to transfer and log the footage, looking after the cards during the process and ultimately returning them to the camera and sound teams. Conveniently, this could occur as cast and crew took breaks, allowing us to use time efficiently and meaning the cards never really became full while in the middle of shooting. Below is a documented version of my log sheet :

I'd never done anything with logging footage before, and this experience allowed me to increase my skills in this department, learning how to use the software Shotput Pro (version 5) in order to do so. I was a bit anxious about messing up something during this process, and I felt a lot of responsibility, as I knew if some footage didn't save or wasn't easily accessible, it would be my fault and I didn't want to ruin the film! However, taking a reasonable amount of time to ensure everything was working correctly (however still working efficiently to maintain a reasonable time schedule to not put production at a halt) and making sure that I understood the process and software well enough, meant that I was confident everything had been transferred and logged successfully.

As a side role, I assisted on continuity last minute when Julia was not available. However, this was a very minor role on my part, which I found incredibly difficult to pick up at times, once again never having done it before. I found it hard to switch from an editor's perspective to being thrown into a continuity perspective, and trying to pick up where someone else had left off and remember details that I hadn't really been looking for before. However, I did try my best and it's definitely gained me an experience.

Similarly to the set build, it was quite a lot of stress for one week during the shooting of Debbie! At times I feel like everyone felt very tense, however I feel this was mainly because of our limited time available to get everything shot and completed. A lot of the days, we were very behind schedule, and we all had to stay and work much later than originally intended. It meant all systems were go pretty much all the time, which was very exhausting. However, I'm glad we were able to stay a lot later and spend more time on achieving what we wanted, because I'd rather the film got finished and be tired than it not and have left on time every day! Despite the stress, I think we all knew it was what was needed for the film, and so we were all willing to go beyond ourselves each day to achieve it. There were a lot of fun times as well on set - a lot of classic DFSA banter between the crew, funny outtakes from the cast - which made the days go by a bit faster and helped us keep some sanity in amongst the chaos! I think the whole production process has been a learning experience for all of us in many different ways, and definitely a big part of the learning process has been developed around solving problems and not letting them cause the production to completely fall apart. There's always going to be some problems, sometimes many problems, but it's how you deal with them when you're out in the field that allows you to learn the best and move on from them, and I think during Debbie this is something that all of us were able to manage and deal, even those at times it was difficult.