The Missing is a horror short film about a girl being followed around the streets of Sheffield by a supernatural figure. It was my first audiovisual narrative project at Sheffield Hallam University (SHU). This was part of my Post Production module, the brief was to create a short 3 minute narrative video of a topic of our choosing. This was a group project and my first opportunity to film in an unrestricted environment since the pandemic. My main roles came in to fruition during post-production as I performed as an editor, VFX artist (basic) and sound designer. Before that I participated in the creation of the storyboards for the project and performed as a ‘runner’ on set.
This was my first proper audiovisual project after a year of relative inactivity due to moving countries during 2021, and thus, I was eager to put my skills to the test to see how rusty I had gotten. I’m quite proud with the results of my efforts, with my favorite scene being the ‘firework scene’.
I came across quite a few challenges through the post production process, with my greatest editing challenge being blurring out the supernatural entity’s face as Premiere Pros’ AI was struggling to detect the actor’s face, this resulted in me manually rotoscoping each frame which was quite an arduous process. Even though I got the job done in the end, I can still see some frames where the mask is moving which haunts me every time I watch it.
Beyond visual editing, I had a great learning curve with sound design. Sadly, all audio for the film was captured through the camera’s microphone and is of relatively low quality, but this also created opportunities to exploit such quality to my advantage such as at 0:35 where I added an audio clip of some dogs barking to the background audio to create more of a “back alley atmosphere”, I personally feel that the integration is seamless as if it was captured on set. Overall I feel like sound design is my weakest point where I have a lot of room to improve and a lot of knowledge yet to acquire.
Lessons Learned:
- How to adapt quickly to a new team and environment.
- How to effectively pitch ideas to team members in a fast paced environment.
- How to follow someone else’s vision whilst still being able to integrate my own style in the project.
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