During the real post-production period, we watched the rushes together and had meetings. We all thought the colors were slightly desaturated and the images looked a little milky. The effect was due to the over-exposure that we have set for the whole film's in order to create a cleaner look. However, we also saw that the red spots that the make-up artist put on the actors body/face were not obvious after being over-exposed a little. Instead of red, it looked a little pink. So in the next scenes to come, we asked Sean, our make-up artist to make it more reddish compared to the amount previously.
Next, we passed the editing work to Benji. After shooting everything and is ready for Benji to edit, we gave him the freedom to have a cut on his own. The first cut was too long and draggy and some of the parts were not as smooth yet. Then came the second cut, it was better when Benji added some sample music in it to see if the mood fits. However, this time I see less images of what I've filmed. The third cut, was the best cut as Benji threw away a lot of unwanted shots to make things flow faster. As a D.O.P., though happy to see that the film was better, I was also disappointed that a lot of nice shots that we covered were not able to be put into the film. So in the end, I only saw 1/3 of the footages that we've shot in the entire film.
When the film was ready to be color-graded, I made sure I had enough sleep that day to ensure the judgements are accurate with the help of the colorist as well. We tried to match the lighting for every scene and made the paragliding scene more saturated to show the happiness and relief towards the end of the film. The last shot where we had to key in the actors onto the paragliding site was also done in Digital Magic as we prepared the HD tape for him.
We didn't experiment much during the color grading as our attempts in the first place didn't require so.
If I were to choose again, I would try to play around with the filters more, in order to serve the story better. Now, the feedback on Hung Zai is that the character is too 'real' and he seems like a real child. It would be hard to distinguish for the audience who doesn't understand the film. The appearance of Hung Zai was thought to be weirder and more sudden. This would bring out the humor in Hung Zai and to enhance their relationship by setting the placement of Hiu Ching and her lupus.
As a conclusion, eventhough the process of the shooting met a lot of problems, but I'm sure that every production has its own problems they have to deal with as well. Personally, I think I have yet to achieve my best ability. There were no challenges that were too big to handle and I thought I should've provided more for my director, Ada. Sometimes we did argue on the set about things and that affected us a little, but I hope in the future I would be able to use a wiser way to negotiate with my partners on either creativity issues or practical issues. Communication is one of the biggest lesson that I've learnt from this project and I wish to apologize to those people that I might have 'black-faced' accidentally (knowing that when I squint my eyes, I look rather angry, but actually I'm not at all)!To all my crew members, I thank you for finishing this film together! It wouldn't have been able to succeed without any of you guys! And for those who were not able to attend, thanks for your moral support!
I have to apologize to my director, Ada and my producer, Olivia because I found that when Uncle Bill's leech was on my forehead, I could be quite harsh trying protect all the shots that we've planned, resulting some overtime and transportation difficulties. This Graduation Project is a valuable experience to me as I have learnt how to be a better filmmaker by learning from my mistakes. I hope that in the future I would be able to continue shooting films and to slowly gain more and more experience to develop my own films next time!
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