Final Cut and Sound Design

Final Cut

For the final cut, I ended up switching the market scene with a scene on the rice fields. I wanted to have more subtle hints to the grandmother being a farmer and each scene is meant to represent a memory that reminds her of her grandmother. Moreover, I ended up rearranging quite a few scenes to make the story flow and read much better. There's a bit where Tala looks at her younger self and Bibi and I would keep swapping its placement from inside the house and on the river. I ended up just placing this bit on the river scene. Another scene I altered was the memories scene, where Tala realises that the little girl is her younger self and they fall past their memories. I realised that this was too similar to Porter Robinson's 'Shelter' music video. I wanted something similar where she's surrounded by her memories but wanted some form of originality. I decided to make this dome-like space with a starry sky and lots of light. Instead of falling into her memories, they rush back to her. The dome is meant to represent her mind, and how it suddenly filled up with old memories. It also transforms the sunset sky into night. The time of day was an important aspect to the film because I wanted a sense of passing time.

The story revolves around time; the past, present and future. This scene in particular involves the night sky because this point in the story is meant to be Tala's darkest moments when she remembers an argument with her grandmother before her death. Though the night sky here shows a low point, it is still well lit by stars that bring the hope of dawn.

I also did some colour correction to the first few scenes in the house. I made this section of the film more gray, not only to make the rest of the film seem livelier but also to show how boring and monotonous Tala's life has become just by suppressing her memories. I really wanted to show how appreciating the past for both the good and bad things can make the present feel so much richer. The past brings context to life and can remind you what you're living for. I wanted to use colour to highlight this. I also wanted to use colour to convey the character's mood. At the start, she finds everything dull (literally) and boring, so everything is desaturated. However, once all the memories come back to her, everything is just so colourful and there's lots of things going on around her.

Furthermore, I also added some post processing to the film. I added particle effects to make old rooms look dustier as well as added twinkles to the night sky. Many scenes felt so static so I added these effects to add a bit more life to them. I found some non-copyright effects with blue backgrounds and used colour correction keys to remove the blue. I decided to use blue instead of green because there would be some artifacts left over from the background and the green was showing too much with the subtle particles. The blue made it so that it blended better with the backgrounds in case there were any artifacts left.

Sound Design

Taking out the original song I wanted to use caused quite a few problems for me. For example, the pacing seemed quite awkward since the music was gone and there were so many scenes of the characters' faces that the moments when their emotions were at their peak felt unimpactful. This was fixed by deleting the redundant close-ups.

On the other hand, removing the music made so much space for audio creativity. I was able to add foley to the animation as well add some non-diagetic ambient music. My tutors and I have discussed that the previous song choice was quite overpowering and felt like it was controlling the animation instead of suppourting it. I found some non-copyright pieces of music that were more ambient than particularly bold pieces of music alone. I looked for music that had a music-box or pitched precussion, mostly recorded instruments and little to no synthesized sounds. In my short-form film, I used two pieces of music. However, I cut bits of the song, and altered the speed and key to fit certain moods. An example of this would be the opening scene of the animation. I used a little snippet of the song that plays when Tala opens the suitcase and slowed it down, changed the key to a minor and gave it a bit of reverb to mimic the sound of an old empty house. Since this is non-diagetic music, I wanted the audience to feel immersed so I added these effects to make it seem like they're in this echoey hallway with the character. I mirrored this at the end with the harp subject from the part where Tala reunites with her grandmother. Except, I made this a higher pitch to make it seem a bit more hopeful and uplifting. I also decided to loop this harp melody to make the audience anticipate change. I want the audience to feel like Tala, who has begun to look forward to continuing her life and is excited to move forward. The change in melody doesn't come of course, and I chose to do this to hint to the audience that no one else would make the change and urges the audience to think of the new melodical possibilities, I want the audience to want to make a change and take initiative themselves, like Tala does.

Storyboard, Animatic and Animation

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