Cuts & Colours

'Doing post' can mean a lot of things. "Fix it in post!" is a famous phrase, uttered by filmmakers who screw up a shot and don't want to undertake a reshoot. A great editor can indeed fix, or at least obscure, a lot of mistakes made on set. Let's see how great of an editor Arms is and examine some of the techniques he used in the FAH post production office!

Editing
Editing is storytelling. Two editors could use the exact same footage and yet cut two completey different movies. Arms uses an array of cutting techniques to great effect, making a funny dialogue utterly hilarious. There are a number of sketches and sketch serials that jump out as being 'made in the edit', and we'll review those here.

Jump Cuts
(Flanagan) (Driving Instructor) (more...)

The jump cut is a gimmick that works very well for comedy, precisely because it's so unrealistic and unexpected. You'll never find it in a soap opera, where realism is the goal. That's why those shows are filmed with a multi camera setup: every cut will switch to a different angle and frame, which feels natural to our eyes and doesn't take us out of the story.

The wipe down, used to switch from post to 'too much post' in The Edit sketch, is a jump cut too, only it's masked by the movement of Arms's hand. Let's slow that down in GIF form: can you spot where Arms made the cut?



Colour correction
We all know this cute little 'behind the scenes sketch' they did, showing Arms doing some post in the post production office, "making [the clips] look a little bit better". What Arms was actually doing (before things got silly) was colour correcting the footage.



Correcting colours simply fixes any colour issues in your footage, making things look as natural as possible. One easy trick is to correct the white balance (which you should also do before filming in your camera settings): find any item on screen that you know for sure should be white, adjust it to actual white, and the whole scene is shifted to a natural tone.

So what did Arms do in The Edit? I've tried to recreate it in Premiere Pro, the editing app from Adobe that Arms also uses.

I've more or less succeeded in recreating his colour correction by adjusting contrast and highlights slightly, and by shifting the shadows, midtones and highlight away from the blueish hues and towards the warmer orangey tones.



Ages Later...
For the same reason that changes in sunlight temperature mess with continuity when you're filming the same scene (see lighting the set), you play with colours in post to suggest midday turned into evening in the blink of an eye. You can even do this on set: with powerful lights and a huge set with lots of gear, you can simulate a night scene while filming in daylight ('day for night'). Why?

But that's not what FAH are doing. They fix it in post! Let's take a look.

In Parents When You Have Friends Over, the colours change very abruptly, indicating hours have passed and thereby supporting the storyline on top of the old movie style cards and Mrs. Flanagan's voice over. The jump cuts between shots make the colour changes even more hilarious. It's all very well thought out and executed, most of it in the editing suite.

It's not easy to spot, but the lads may have used some colour filters for their lights on set to change the temperature. For most of the shoot though, they had daylight lighting them from behind, as well as a key light lighting their faces. Let's start with a shot from the outro, which isn't colour graded at all. Note: that doesn't mean it wasn't colour corrected (adjusting image qualities such as contrast and midtone levels). Compare it to the first shot in the sketch, which has nearly the same framing: a little bit of colouring goes a long way!