Cinematography + Editing Tests

Cinematography.

Seeing my film was set in 1912 I wanted it to look old and Cinematography played a major part in that. At first I did some test shots but then added a yellow tinge so it was not as obvious as Sepia but still had an old camera look about it. This did not produce the best outcome so I tried Imovie and Final Cut's sepia effects.  

Imovie created a rather annoying old film effect which did not have many setting I could tweak. It purposely lowed the quality of the image and put in over exaggerated lines and hairs. This gave a very cheesy effect and If I wanted a poor quality image I would not have filmed it in HD. 

Final Cut was perfect for what I wanted (colour and filter wise.) It gave me the option to tweak any effects with out having a cheesy look.
After playing around with the effects I created the sepia image I wanted, I did this by:

Fiddling with the Gamma : +1.5
the amount of sepia : 56 / 100
Highlight ( dependent on the shot) +2 to +10  
And final cut had a default sepia tint, on this I brightened it up by two white tones.
This gave me the perfect sepia image I was looking for. 

Editing.

I created several different cuts of the film because the original Directors Cut was 4 Mins: 20s and brief said It needed to be 2 minuets. I had several Ideas on how to achieve this. At first I tried speeding it up by 50%, but this just gave a comical effect and the film lost all its authenticity.
Then I looked around some old footage of the time to see what it would have looked like. I found this video:http://www.newsplayer.com/women-do-factory-work-during-first-world-war-video

It shows a big crowd, but what I found interesting from this was that the frame rate seemed to be incredibly low and I wondered if I could cut time by cutting out frames. This turned out to look good in some places but not throughout because at most points if the camera had moved during the shot, when cutting a small selection of frames it seemed to look like a jump cut or a major continuity error. So there is a couple of moments were you may notice this in the film, but most likely not because they are quite subtle.

 I ended up cutting time the "old fashioned way". I cut out as many frames as I could on each end of the shot, and then deleting several shots all together, for example my crane shot. I built a crane for this film, did over 100 takes with it then had to cut the shot out. It was the longest shot and most planned shot in the film, it was around 35 seconds in length.


Long Version: 


Dropping Frames Experiment: