Life in a Day - Entry 3: Post Production

During the post production process, I was also tasked with compiling the entire documentary together. As usual, the software I used was Adobe Premiere Pro. I had decided to edit my segment directly within the documentary project rather than on its own, so it wouldn't need to be re-rendered. In addition to my own segment, I also helped edit Min Kee's, Ajez's and Luthfi's segments. I had Ajez and Raihan Y come over as they still needed to finish up their segments, while they also assisted me at the same time.

During this process, we used different production techniques to construct an image of ourselves, and other people. For example, everyone tried to link their segments together using transitions, such as similar clips, or simple cross dissolves. This is most evident between Sebastian and Sasha's clips, where Sebastian ends his clip in his car and Sasha starts her clip in her car.

We started compiling the entire documentary first, and I decided to edit in my segment when the part comes. Luthfi's segment came first. We wanted to incorporate it with the intro sequence somehow, so we just put the segment in first and touched it up a bit. At this point, we still haven't came up with an idea for the intro, so we just left a space between his and Ajez's segment. Speaking of which, his segment was particularly 'fun' to edit because there were so many special effects. We color graded the first and second running scenes yellow and blue, respectively. After Ajez came Min Kee's segment, which also happened to take place at a McDonalds. We decided to transition the two segments using Min Kee's clip of the purple mascot and an intertitle. The rest of the clips was as simple as dragging and dropping them in order and adding transitions such as fades and cross dissolves.

The idea for the intro was thought up by Raihan and Ajez. The song used was "Everybody Loves The Sunshine" by Roy Ayers. We timed the start of the music to the part where the toast came up and inserted the title and introductory credits, which were also timed to parts of the song. In the end, we agreed it worked very well.

As for my own segment, I also just had to drag and drop my footage in the order I wanted it shown. Because I ended up shooting on two different Fridays, and some shots weren't in order, it was slightly difficult to tell which clip goes where. However, I did manage to figure it out. I did not put any special effects because I didn't think they were needed, and I didn't put any subtitles because there wasn't any important dialogue.

In the end, I exported the movie in the H.264 format and set the framerate to 24 fps. The total time it took to export was about half an hour.