Phobia

I am one of the director of cinematographer and editor in this project. As the camera man, I need to control the lighting and sound recording work on the set. As the post-production coordinator, I am responsible for DIT, editing, sound production and color grading, respectively.

The course required to use moving cameras to tell a story. I thought that matching cuts (contrasts) and long takes would be the best way to show the advantages of a moving camera. However, the long takes were hard for good control of the pace of the film.

Moreover, our location was not as wide as we thought and it was impossible to show a thriller in three minutes with a lot of long takes and make it have a strong rhythm. Therefore, I tried a lot of jump cuts and flashing whites with music sequences to increase the pace of the film. The initial challenge was to take the best parts out of the long takes and make them into a tense story. So we decided to make an experimental thriller.

The problem we met during the shooting was that our shooting schedule was ruinously disrupted. We had originally rented the location for three days, but the landlord told us we could only use two days. We hadn't finished shooting the whole production. This was certainly the biggest challenge for an editor, I needed to build a new story with not enough material. Therefore, we decided to do a trailer.

In addition, the original plan for this project was to make full use of the moving camera to achieve the effect we wanted. But now, due to the lack of material, I will be using horrible sound effects to create a scary atmosphere. The editing was done through music and the melody of the sound effects, and more ambient shots were added to the original script to give the audience a visual impact.

During the editing process we shot in 4k 60fps, I obviously overestimated my computer. So, after many days of researching proxy editing, I upgraded my computer. As a post- production coordinator, I should have thought about this situation in advance, especially on my own equipment. The biggest problem I encountered while editing was that of finding sound sources. It took me a long time to conceptualize the structure of the whole film, from a calm (childhood) to the first climax (growing up) with a thunder sound with a lightning effect from the lights; a second calm (the grown-up brother) to the second climax (the female puppet opening her eyes) with a rising sound effect to achieve that tension; a third calm (the older brother's toy falling) to a transition ( the brother's toy) reaches a climax (the brother gradually approaches with an ax). I have to say that I learned a lot from this process. I kept learning the tricks of the trade by constantly watching other horror trailers and discussing them daily with my group members to eventually compose this final sequence. Although It's still not perfect, maybe we'll shoot the after story sometime in the future.

I am faced with various challenges through this shoot. For the color grading, I used contrasts between warm and cold colors and enabled a lot of the images to be darker. I think I almost did it. For the next shot, I will prepare more fill lights as much as our objective conditions allow, and start learning Da Vinci color grading. I think this will lead me to make more successful shoots.