Documentary Editing

We attempted to construct a rough cut for our documentary on multiple occasions however each time we ended up hitting brick wall and so we decided to seek out some vintage photographs to reimburse our inspiration, we knew we wanted to attain some sort of nostalgia in our piece the photos felt like the right direction. We managed to find photos of the market online which were under the copyright of the 'Sheffield City Library', after obtaining the photos we placed them in our 'Final Cut Pro' timeline to give the piece a historic background where the audience would then build their empathy for the traders which are later seen in the film. We used the wide black and white photo as an establishing shot choosing to zoom in with the motion tool to add some movement.  

  Establishing shot.

 Rather than just pausing on the photos as part of a metric montage we zoomed in on each one to capture moments and customers faces to give a sense of character.

In this photo we zoomed in on the couple to the right and the man behind the group in the left, we would later add atmos from our current visits to the market to bring the photos to life.

Due to the portrait framing of this photo we used a pan down from the ceiling to avoid a sudden change in aspect.

After setting up the correct timeline we renamed all the footage and created various bins in which would contain the pro res footage we had already categorised  the bins also correspond with the folders on the scratch disc so that everything is precisely arranged for the sake of organisation and prevention of lost footage. The interview structure we went for allowed for an emotional connection with the traders sympathising with their postion that the new building will jeopardise, with the history setting the scene the dialogue from the contributors gives informative detail on the problem and also relates back to the early days of the market justifying the use of the vintage photographs. 

We made sure one contributor isn't on screen for too long however long enough for the audience to reach out to them on a personal level in order to understand their position, because we only asked brief questions the subject matter is easily seen in the responses and so we could group dialogue from opposing contributors together so it gave the impression they were debating over the same idea, such as the social aspect of the market.

Following on from this rough construction we could then start to add cutaways on top of the vox pops to reduce the talking head aesthetic, we would use a cutaway of the traders produce or stall before the contributor appears on screen so that their appearance is less abrupt this approach also allows us to cut between different time frames to create an overall more interesting pace.

Another factor for our inspiration was the 1950's track that we found from "freemusicarchive.org" we felt the track gave the film the vintage atmosphere we were aiming for, the quintessential vocals bring the audience back to the time when the market was flourishing as it plays to compliment the photographs. The genre of the music was 'Swing' by artist "Spade Cooley & the Western Swing Dance Gang Feat. Tex Williams" after playing the track over cutaways it instantly gave them context and presence as originally they appeared lifeless. 

We used 'iTunes' to convert the mp3 to a wav file which is more compatible with 'Final Cut Pro' due to its uncompressed nature.

We then located the track in our finder subsequently adding it to its own bin in 'Final Cut Pro'.

As we had used the original track for our opening sequence which allowed the audience to hear a vast majority of it, we felt that another track of the same genre and tone would sufficient to be used in a montage later in the film, this track was also from the 'freemusicarchive.org' website, using the same conversion process it was then added to the bin we had previously created for the first track. 

This song was used for the tonal montage later in the film which depicted the lonely sight of the traders un boxing produce and readying their stalls, its slower place and less up beat tempo fitted well with the vacant food market without suggesting something too discouraging. 

We used 'Adobe Photoshop' to create the text which would later introduce the contributors in the film, these consisted of the persons name at the top and their profession/job title underneath separated by a thin line, to maintain an overall polished feel which also fitted with the 1950's aesthetic we kept the type face of these similar to the 'Castle Market Sheffield' film title which is seen earlier in the film. Once content with the layout of the title we changed the colour from black to white then saving the file as a 'png' so that the background wasn't visible, allowing ultimate freedom when positioning in 'Final Cut Pro'. 

Pictured above is a view of the finished contributor titles

Subsequently we imported the titles into 'Final Cut Pro' allocating them to a designated bin under the name 'Titles', we later dragged the png over the cutaway previous to the vox pop.  

To introduce the title for our film we felt designing a quintessential type face would be the best approach to complement our reminiscent opening sequence. We had the idea that our final tracking shot would freeze frame when cued by a crescendo in the music simultaneously the title 'Castle Market Sheffield' would appear initiating the end of the opening sequence and the beginning of the interviews which would take place shortly after a pause with a completely black screen. We exported the frame we wanted to freeze on as a png which we could take into 'Adobe Photoshop', we would use this as a way of deciding which font would suit the footage. 

Pictured above is the type face we went with notice its very similar to the contributor titles, this 'Photoshop' process was in fact done before the contributor titles. We took the shade of red from the "...nicks" meat stall sign seen in the small freeze frame above.  

We tried out variations of the colour scheme e.g red outline white text, white outline red text etc. 

Ultimately we decided that the title should be completely red however slightly paler to give it an aged feel as this would later fade to black and white grain.

This is the final version of the font/type face we went with.

We stretched the freeze frame to a rough duration leaving an estimated gap in which we would use as the pause before interviews.

We used the same exported freeze frame in which to adjust to reflect an antique 1950's aesthetic, we started by changing the image to black and white, followed by altering the 'RGB' 'Curves' by doing this we could achieve the right amount of contrast bearing in mind that white text would be placed in the foreground. 

 We subjected the image to the 'Grain' tool this was a crucial modification in the editing process, this texture of grain gave an instant vintage impression, as you can see the two images in comparison to one another, the un altered freeze frame would slowly fade into the latter of the two along with the red text fading to white (seen in the following screen shots).

 Once satisfied with the image we concentrated on the type face, using the exact text from before we began modifying. Firstly we used the 'Colour Overlay' under the 'Blending Options' menu to change the text to white, we felt that a slight outer glow would suggest antiquity. The background image was later adjusted to a less contrasted state as the text felt overwhelmingly sharp this now more washed out curve of contrast embedded the text.

 The outer glow was also added to "Castle Market".

After a second look at the image we still felt it looked too clean and sharp and so we further adjusted the brightness and contrast into the minus points. 

This is the finished version of the text and image, notice we also gave the "Castle Market" a reduced glow, we saved the image a png ready for the 'Final Cut Pro' timeline.

After importing the vintage png into 'Final Cut Pro' we arranged it adjacent to the freeze frame, we used a 'Cross Dissolve' between the two images to initiate the fade. The black and white image itself suggests the market over the years in terms of its physical structure hasn't changed drastically, the formation of the layout remains greatly unmodified the traders efforts to preserve the essence still stands solid however the decrease in trade has provoked a great depletion in efforts to preserve the markets appearance which is evident in later pieces of footage, we feel that this idea justifies the implementation of the slow fade from colour to black and white.