Critique and Tweak

After submitting Adrift to No Sleep ‘til Film Fest, I sent the film to several friends and family members to get their feedback on it. The overall consensus was that the film was well crafted and shot, but the story wasn’t entirely clear.

The main issue was that the climax of the story lacked clarity when the main character asks “why.” While everyone had their unique interpretation of the story that ended up having the same core concept as intended, we certainly needed to edit some things for clarity. Additionally, I realized that there were quite a few issues with the sound design. Because we edited all of the sound (including the score) without headphones, it was hard to hear if the audio was choppy or not. Unfortunately, this meant that the film we submitted for the film festival had many issues with sound effects cutting off.

Luckily, there was another film festival we could submit Adrift to, called the Atlanta High School Film Festival. This festival had a submission deadline on April 25th, which gave us a short window of time to make the edits we wanted before submitting our film. With school being off on Friday, the 23rd, Shreyansh Dixit and I agreed to meet and work on any edits so we could submit a better version of Adrift.

On Friday, we started with the most obvious and raunchy part of the film that needed attention - the sound design. To our surprise, editing in more echoes, adding reverb, and finding a way to make the reason why our character says “why?” at the climax proved to be more tedious and challenging than we had expected.

We worked from around 9:35 am to 7:30 pm with some breaks in between, which allowed us to finish all the edits we wanted to get done in terms of visuals and sound design, but we weren’t able to touch the score or colors yet.

Nonetheless, we were very pleased with the edits we made. After getting some positive feedback from family members, I was hopeful that the new edits and my color grading would make the story more clear and cohesive.

I spent Friday evening and almost all of Saturday color grading the footage. As per usual, I went through a cycle of liking my work, doubting it, hating it, overthinking things, and finally finding a far more simple solution that ends up working in the end. Even though I watched a 1-hour course from a commercial colorist on color grading in DaVinci Resolve, I still struggled quite a bit. However, by a little past midnight on Saturday, I managed to export a graded version of the film that I felt proud of. Below is the finalized version of the film we came up with and submitted to the Atlanta High School Film Festival:

Although we didn’t get to make any adjustments to the score as I had hoped, I’m extremely pleased with how the film turned out in the end. I’m also very excited to see what feedback I receive from others about the film! My hopes in the next week are to work on the score, but even if I can’t get those edits in, I’m very pleased with how the final product turned out.