Last time I talked about the challenges we faced during the shooting process for A Breach of Solace. This time, I’m going to talk about the editing and sound design process.

If you read the post from last year, you may remember that I talked about how agonizing it was to cut the film down to three minutes. By the time we had a cut that we wanted, it was nearly 4:30 and we had to trim off almost ninety seconds of footage. Ouch. This time things went much smoother. Part of what made this edit so much easier was that we had the experience of how long three minutes actually is from working on Intruder, so we planned for it in the shot list phase.

We had a first draft cut together in just a couple of days and I chugged away at it for about a week and a half following that. The toughest part about this time around–at least compared to last year–was the colour grading. Last year we edited in Final Cut Pro X, which plays really nicely with DaVinci Resolve (a colour correction and grading program). This year, however, I did the editing instead of Kyle. I don’t own Final Cut Pro, so I used the Adobe suite on my PC. Premiere has a lot of great functionality packed into it and it made a lot of the very specific edits I wanted to do relatively easy to accomplish, but the colour editing capabilities are not up to par. The suite does include Adobe’s own grading software, SpeedGrade, but I didn’t have it available to me at the time. So, the longest part of the process became the colour grading and it didn’t turn out quite as well as I’d hoped, but I at least managed to fix the major issues and create something relatively close to the atmosphere I had in my mind.

The sound design portion of our editing time went well. We used a combination of the Zoom H5n, Zoom H1, and the Rode Video Micro that we got for participating in 2015 to record our ADR and Foley and they worked fantastically. We didn’t even need to do a lot of intense mixing, unlike Intruder, since the dialogue was the primary focus of this film.

Once everything was all said and done, we uploaded our final product (viewable here) to YouTube and submitted our link to Rode. Then all we had to do was take a page out of Frank Underwood’s book and rally some votes for the People’s Choice award. We posted links to our personal social media profiles, hashtagged all the right things we could think of, talked to people in person, and even put links in filmmaking Facebook groups to find people who could appreciate the product we’d made with the budget we had. It mostly worked too; we never got a final tally of the votes we received but it must have been several hundred by the end, considering our ranking. By the time the competition finished, we were teetering between rank 4 and 5 in all genres in Canada (they don’t tell you your final ranking, you just have to count them up at some point before voting closes) and were rank 139 worldwide: that’s the top 10% in every way you measure it. Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough to secure us the People’s Choice prize package, but we were still incredibly pleased with our performance. There were also a number of technical awards available to be won as selected by the judges but we were not selected for them either.

We will certainly be carrying all of the lessons we learned this year forward into the next festivals and competitions we enter and, hopefully, will continue to improve until we finally snag one of those excellent Rode Reel prizes!

Thanks for reading through our latest adventure in filmmaking. You can be sure that there will be more posts like this coming in the future so be sure to check back later for more.

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Until next time!