This is a short film that I edited with footage that I licensed from Editstock because I wanted to get some practice editing narrative film from scratch. This short grabbed my attention because seeing some of the initial footage and the opportunity for some visual effects work pulled me in.
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This short film also had some horror elements to it that I was excited to work on and I liked the script when I read it as I felt like this could be a good project to work on because it had a good amount of dialogue and a little bit of action to edit.  I tried to give myself about a month to get all of this completed because I wanted to set a deadline to shoot for. Check out my edit below.

To start my process was first to sort through all of the footage that was provided, most of the shots were already broken down into different folders created by Editstock. I started by getting the different shots tagged in Premiere Pro so that I could sort them into bins before starting my edit. With everything marked I then like to create Search Bins in Premiere so that I can keep footage in folders for different setups but also with everything for each character in case I’m looking for reaction shots or specific lines of dialogue.

With all of my bins setup and my footage tagged I then go through and get my selects gathered onto a timeline so that I have a very rough cut on the timeline.

With a rough cut on the timeline I then like to go through the timeline and start to tighten things up trying to get a better flow for dialogue and action. Some of the selected shots that I picked may or may not work well together and this is where I would typically add reaction shots if I have them or try to get everything flowing together. This process continues for me as I go back through the edit numerous times just trying to see what is working for me and what is not working.

Once I get to the point where I am happy with the edit it is then time for me to start working on the visual effects and adding music and sound effects.

With my edit complete, I then duplicate that sequence and I start to go through the sequence and find any shots that need visual effects work completed. Those shots I put on a video layer above the timeline so that I can easily see them and I color code those shots. For this short there weren’t too many shots that needed vfx, but it did have a few. Those shots being the double doctor and compositing the eyes onto the doctor’s face once it has been ripped off revealing the “Bone Grue” face underneath.

For the double doctor shot this was overall pretty simple to achieve with a mask. The hardest part of this shot was that I wanted to have the doctor coming out of the door and moving in shot still. My first pass at this didn’t quite line up as I wanted it to which is why I would end up doing this in Mocha and scaling up the shot slightly. Why I didn’t just start with tracking the shot is that I thought it might be easier to set 2 keyframes and just animate the motion with the curves but this didn’t look the way wanted it to look so I moved to tracking the motion.
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Since the camera starts to tilt a bit while it is panning over to the actor in the frame I opted to track this in Mocha after trying just a position keyframe and using the opacity of the top layer to line things up. With the track done in Mocha I could then apply that data to the dentist in the doorway layer and then make the adjustments needed to sell the movement. In order to have it match the movement of the foreground layer of the shot I applied directional blur and then keyframed it as needed although subtle to match the shot and have it tie together.

Since I know Mocha would be able to track the sign on the wall quite easily that is what I used for the tracking point. A quick selection around that provided a good track in Mocha for this shot. I did scale up the background doctor a bit since there was a little bit of a shift due to the camera focus.

For the eyes on the face there is a video below that shows the before and after of the shot. For these shots I started with getting a track in after effects of the points on the face. I opted to just use the basic tracker for these shots because I knew I would be able to get a good track and since the shots overall are fairly simple this would do the job. With the tracking data complete I brought the eyes plate in and precomposed the layers. I then could work with the left and right eyes separate and attached those to the tracking data.

With the rough versions of the layers applied to the face I then went ahead and created a mask around just the part of the eye that I wanted to keep. I adjusted the position of the layer slightly for each eye to make sure that it lined up with the area of the makeup that was meant for the “eye socket.” At this point, I needed to warp the layers slightly to make it match the way the face was in perspective and I used a corner pin to do this and just distorted the eye slightly to get it to match throughout the shot.

With the eyes moving well through the shot it was time to color correct them to get them to match the shots better. My technique for this is to use the levels effect on the eye layer and then go through each of the different color channels in the viewer(seen below) and the effect. This is done by, looking at just the red channel I switch the Levels effect to the red channel and adjust the levels effect on that layer to get it to match the black and white image seen in after effects. Once I do this for each channel and switch back to the RGB view in the viewer the shot should match quite well. I did a slight tweak of the color afterwards for the eyes to add just a bit of style to them but otherwise the shot looked good overall.

The last step for these shots was to match the depth of field for the eyes as the plates were shot with the eyes in focus. I used a little bit of blur for this and then to match the motion blur that was on the final shot I used directional blur and just animated it as needed to match what I was seeing throughout the shot.