Post Production

After everything was done related to the shooting, I started out with the post-production. The very first thing I did was to organize all the files I had which would make the workflow a lot faster and easier:

The folders contain the footage of the matching scenes :

After organizing these, I started looking for the best takes and moved all the other unnecessary files to a folder called "Unused". I did this for each of the 4 sequences. I preferred moving over deleting, in case I changed my mind in the future and decided to use another clip or audio from another clip.

Then I started looking for music. Learning from my Foundation Portfolio, I knew I could find great Royalty and Copyright-free music on YouTube. So, I started searching there. I downloaded a few Music files and SFX (Sound Effects).

Next step was to make a Premiere Pro project (Please notice the name of the project differs in pictures, this is because I ended changing the name mid-way again. I started out with "Bullying", then changed it to "Bullies Make Bullies" and then finally to "Reciprocate").

After this, I dragged a movie clip on my timeline, which created an automatic sequence with the same settings as the movie clips from my camera. After this, I started laying out all my clips in order, adding music, SFX, and titles. This gave me a rough cut, aka the first preview of the mvie and this allowed me to pinpoint any changes I had to make, gave me the general idea of how the cuts will work and where the continuity was crucial:

As the lighting, I had for outdoor scenes (when Kumail bumps into Rohail) was very bad, I had to resort using my smartphone's flashlight. the video below shows how I adjusted the lighting before starting the recording:

This, as you might have noticed, caused a little bit of vignette around the corners. So, I lifted up the shadows and increased the exposure a few stops to make it look better. The increase in exposure caused the scene to lose some contrast, I added a little contrast and lastly, I added a little bit of positive vignette to brighten up the corners:

This was pretty much anything major that I needed to do regarding color correction and continuity. However, to add more realism and drive the continuity and attention even more smoothly, I decided to keep the minimum amounts of breaks between music. To introduce anew track, I gradually lowered the volume of a track to 0 and simultaneously increased the volume of the other track to the desired volume:

And with that, my post production was completed. I exported the movie in H.264 format, with YouTube 1080p HD preset so that I could upload it on YouTube: