Unseen Abilities

They say sound is 50% of your movie experience and that filmmakers often overlook the importance of spending extra time sound editing. I couldn’t agree more - sound or lack of it is one of those things that can quickly make your film feel boring or cheesy. Another often overlooked task is color correction.

Unseen Abilities was shot in HD and most of the footage looks pretty decent without color correction, but after I started applying it, I quickly discovered its power. Take a look at the following shot, before and after using the FCP color program:

Notice how much the image improved? The hand pops out, has depth and the car door now has some color to it. The color corrected version tells much more of a story than the original image captured through the HD camera.

Another way to quickly understand the power of color correction is to watch the behind the scenes footage on a movie. Look for clips that show a movie being filmed and the corresponding scene in the movie to see how vibrant and stylized the movie version is. It’s not just a difference in the camera used, colorists are playing a big role as well.

Of course, small independent filmmakers don’t have money to spend on a colorist, but they still can do amazing things with the Final Cut Pro Color program, which I heard was a $50,000 each-license program before Apple acquired it and added it to the FCP Studio. Don’t be intimidated by it: give color a try or at least the 3 way color corrector in FCP.

Movie editing is one of my favorite things to do, but the self-teaching method can be quite frustrating for an independent filmmaker. I’ve used Final Cut Pro for a few small personal projects, but underestimated the amount of work involved in editing HD footage to make a solid half hour short film.

The problem isn’t knowing what I want to do or how to do it. The problem is how buggy the various software programs are and how one wrong setting can set you into a lengthy investigation process to figure out what is wrong.

In the last week, we’ve probably spent a combined 20 hours troubleshooting various Sound Track Pro problems. Granted, we are both new to the software and are working off over sized files, but there’s no doubt the program has issues. The good news is that our investigation skills are solid, and we’ve been able to overcome each hurdles thus far. Occasionally, I hope to share our findings to help other filmmakers avoid similar issues. God knows we could have used some clear answers online, but find very little support for Sound Track Pro.

As the first official post on the Unseen Abilities site, I want to share my goals with the site and with the movie.

I’d like the site to share my experiences as a 1st time writer, director & producer who hopes to gain attention from investors so I can turn the movie into a full feature after doing well in the film festivals. I hope other filmmakers will find my tips valuable or at least join me in the conversation of what it is like to create a movie.

I’d also like to provide fans of the movie with more information about he people involved in making this film possible.

Yes, I am writing my first post @ 3:40 am after struggling with Final Cut Pro & Sound Track Pro issues. This is another thing I intend to write about as I had to do a lot of troubleshooting due to the lack of solid documentation available online or in the manuals.

More soon,
Dustin Woodard

We’re switching the unseen abilities site to use wordpress so we can more regularly update the site. Thanks for your patience over the next day or so.