Girl Happy - Final Assembly of Edit

Today I went in to assemble the final edit of Girl Happy with the other Editor and the Director.  We have the final colour file back from the colourist, the final audio track back from the sound team, the animations for the opening credits from the animator and the final credits I have on my mac which we made and I have adjusted. We decided to do the final build in Premiere Pro as we have all the footage in the correct format for this and this will save a lot of time as if we were to go back into avid we would have to transcode again etc.

We set up a project and began final assembly. This was literally a case of compiling all these elements together. Once we had them all together we check they were in the right place and everything was synced correctly. We then watched it through to check that everything was correct. At this point the Director pointed out some issues with the colouring and the sound that had not been fixed by the appropriate teams. The colourist had forgotten to colour a few frames in a scene so we contacted her and got her to colour these frames and then transfer us the new file with these frames coloured. However when it came to sound issues with levels etc the sound team were all unavailable and with a deadline fast approaching we have no time to wait around for them. Instead we decided to use our intittive to DIY tackle these issues ourselves, or at least the major ones that we could fix. Here are the issues and how we fixed them:

During the phone conversation with Georgie and her boyfriend you can hear the boyfriend say Georgie down the phone twice as she tried to hang up which is very jarring with visuals. We decided to remove the section Georgie by cutting out this very small section of sound and duplicating some ambience form this scene instead to cover the gap.

The beginning scene has a blanket rustling sound effect as the boyfriend appears from under the covers. However this sound is too loud and isn the right type of rustle to fit the visual. We have taken the loudest sections of rustles where no other noises are heard and no dialogue and lower the levels so it at least isn't as jarring for the audience.

In the shirt when ben sits in his room alone a lot of the sound effects of him moving are far too loud and the rustling of his shirt is again the wrong type of rustling. We decided that we would just lower the whole sound level slightly of this scene to make these sound effects less distracting from the emotional intent of the scene. We also cut out some of the loudest rustles and agin replied it with duplicated ambience form this same scene.

There are other sound issues and colouring issues however the Director has made the agreement with us that at this later stage leading ups to deadline we will export it with the DIY changes we've made to the bets of our ability and then after hand in before she does any premiers or festival entires we are all going to revisit it to get the sound team, colourist and ourselves to improve the small issues left in it. However I feel as an editor I have done everything within my power and time constraints to make this edit as best as it can be I just feel it is a case of poor organisations and timing which has left the film with the few flaws it does have currently.