28/02/2018 - CROSS COLLABORATION EDITING 2

We all arrived on Wednesday to begin with what we hoped would be the final stint of editing. However Lewis had some news to break. He had been speaking with some of the other groups and had come to the conclusion that the photoshop rotoscoping we had used looked too contemporary for the footage. He even said how some of the other groups had specifically applied old film filters to their videos, and even removed all traces of modern technology. So we would have to come up with another way to animate the genderbread's dialogue, and discard the icons we had planned.

Oliver had informed the group that he had been called away to work in Ipswich, and would therefore still be unable to attend. We also relistened to the audio from the day before and found the recorded audio from Jake's northern accent and deep voice were a bit too monotone for the cheery, reassuring and also importantly non gender binary character of the genderbread person. It was definitely at this point when the video production started to take a definite step away from his complete plan, and started down a path of it's own, with the suggestion of filming and superimposing a genuine human mouth overtop, and recording the script again with alongside the footage of a new talking mouth. We then also chose the cheeriest voice in the group, which belonged to Kristan, and got recording.

Of course, in abandoning the rotoscoping and hand-drawn finish for a roughly superimposed and highly zoomed human mouth, especially alongside the unsettling white eyes, we knew we were definitely taking a different direction. However at this point Oliver didn't appear to be coming along to help out any more, and we were all a little tired of trying to accommodate the specific vision of someone who wasn't putting in any further effort to help deliver it, and was still in possession of most of the documents and inspirations which had been specifically prepared to help us create and piece the whole thing together.

This was meant to be a collaborative excersize, and it felt like the time to take initiative and develop areas of the footage in new ways. So everyone got to work with matching up the dialogue and mouth footage to each part of the video. James and Lewis taught those of us who didn't know how to, and everyone took a different section. By splitting up the job like this we made much faster progress and also got everyone busily working away together in true spirit of the collaboration. However once this had been completed, and everyone had transferred the areas of the video they had been working on into the central file share, there was little anyone could do further besides James and Lewis simply sitting and working through the material and piecing it together. If we tried to split this job up it could make the work look more fragmented and less cohesive, besides James and Lewis were happy to take the roles on from home, allowing us to wrap up this element of the editing.

In this second day of editing I really feel like we overcame the problems facing us with an absent director and really pulled together as a group under our own initiative. We also found a way to bring the project back into an area which we all felt more confident with delivering, whilst resting assured that the base dialogue and educational information Oliver had laid out for us as a framework was strong, accurate and informative. Although I was glad that the hard work was over on what had truly been a challenging but educational project, I was very excited to see the finished product, and felt that the boys might still make further changes during the final stages of editing and structuring, however time could only tell whether this would happen or not.