Post-production [Gemi's editing experience]

 Here is the editing process of the movie. This post was produced by Gemi [teammate]

Our friend Gus Yudha does most of the camera work since it's his camera and he is the only one that knows how to operate the ronin mechanical tripod well. Some scenes really look professional and smooth due to the tripod. The camera was only used for the main shots, not the drafts or practice. The picture under is Gus.

We could have planned the schedule for the filming better, it took a while which limited the editing time. We did a lot of improvises along the way. (Like the alleyway after the car scene).

We did some drafts for clean drug transactions that look good on camera. We planned to make at least 3 different drug trades in different locations:

Our first rough draft:

• Too short
• Too simple
• Only 2 people

Behind the scenes

The second draft is roughly what's going to happen for the real drug and brownie trade, only need to edit the jump cuts to make it feel fast-paced as this is an action movie. I really like how the camera switches point-of-view to inside the locker as Jason tries to get the drugs. We added that undershot of baron to replicate a feeling to the audience that the teachers are the ones the dealers are afraid of but learn not all of them are bad. When we implement this for our film, we can't have more than 2 drug trades with different locations, due to the limited 2-minute duration cap. 

We used WhatsApp as our main communication method, it also has a feature to use voice messages and our friend Elang recorded the roar. We had the idea of changing the distributor credit opening in a more funny way, we spoofed it since we need a more comedic part, our movie is Action/Comedy. Also recorded the ambient noises of the school canteen to fill off space at the beginning.

The footage we recorded was all in big sizes, instead of using hard drives or USBs, we thought it will be better to take advantage of our special school gmail's google drive that has infinite storage. Everyone can also access it instantly. This probably saved a lot of production time.

I used premiere pro for editing, I'm more familiar with this software and if I'm confused in some parts since premier is so popular, I always get what I'm looking for most on Youtube. I'm in charge of every editing and Jason did the transitions between the clips with his software Adobe After Effects.

Special animations are better done with After Effects

Greenscreen alleyway clip

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Jason used the roto brush feature on After effects to create some sort of green screen for another way to transition. To remove the greenscreen, I added the clip I want to transition above the green alleyway clip and used a tool from premiere which is the Ultrakey.

A simple drag and drop, then change the ultra key color to green to remove it.

Alot of the scenes uses jump-cuts. Thankfully it's very simple as I just have to cut clips and some scenes according to the beat of the song (Living La Vida Loca).

Raw footage, no jumpcuts

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After editing

I realized while editing, the camera work is the most important part of the whole movie making in my opinion. Without it, it's really hard to edit and put them all together. If done well, editing gets much easier as I just place one scene and another together without further touches.

Jason owns a drone at home so I had a great idea to fly down the drone with its built-in camera to transition to the first drug scene. It's a great way to elevate the opening's action feeling. Stuff like this enhance quality without intense editing. But of course, the drone or a professional movie boom arm were needed.

2nd drone shot

Establishing shot

Following typical high-school starter openings we added an establishing shot of the whole school with the drone also.

The next thing I did was edit our main antagonist, our teacher Mr. Benjamin roleplayed as the movie's school principal. He is meant to look intense, scary, and menacing on screen, we also added an easter egg where he mentions 'maggots' referring to the students because he is a military veteran. We chose him because his appearance looks like a stereotypical strict principal. 

We added a decent amount of different types of shots to show his character and appearance. We didn't show his face because it keeps the mystery to keep the audience interested. Jason did the camerawork.

Arranging the clips was easy but the hardest part was putting everything in sync with the audio. It's hard because the speech must follow his lips to make it synced. It took a while but trial and error did the trick. I used the website Soundtrap to edit the principal's voice with a reverb sound effect to make him sound like he is actually talking with the P.A mic. A good touch to enhance the quality of the footage. 

Principal scene

Mr. Benjamin's audio on Soundtrap

The audio clip sounded a little odd due to a recording error, the audio sounded like it was more strong on the right side of your ear if you use headphones, so I lowered the pan. Next to the pan wheeler is the reverb which increases sound echo, simulating his voice like being heard in hallways.