Thanks! A lot of the time was spent in the learning curve. NTL, once I hit a good plateau, getting the timing right was not so simple. I'm not 100% pleased with the cuts at the front and back of scene 2 (the loooooong one).
OTOH, in scene 2, the change from Esther Garcia's Crossing The Universe to Michael Cires' The Light Through The Trees was a tough one. The results pleases me no end. Crossing is in 3/4 time while The Light is in 4/4. I had to get The Light going as the first beat after the preceding three beats in Crossing. (3/4 = three beats to a measure or waltz time, 4/4 = four beats to the measure or what most music uses). Anything else (e.g., picking up after beat one or two or in between the beats) sounds soooo wrong, even for non-musicians. It's like a stumble while walking - hard to miss.
(Footnote: scene 2 opens with Alexander Blu's Electricty. This is by way of a thank you to Alexander Thiessen (in the Inspiration From: list). He introduced me to Jamendo and Blu. His Alps videos were also a starting point for me. Search for him on YouTube. The videos want some editing, but where he was riding is awesome. Start with the Timmelsjoch video; all will become clear. Anyway...)
Scene 2
is too long. I tried a set of jump cuts, to lose much of the straight parts, and it looked awful. It looked like MTV video-paced cuts on meth. I'll try cross fades. The problem is the bike and the yellow line, in crossfades, are close to each other, but not quite the same. It's much like the audio stumble above. Worse, going in and out of shade and sunlight limits choices. The cut from scene 2 to 3 shows that.
In this cut, I cut one frame after a frame that shows a big flash off the gauges. With much of scene 3 brighter than the end of scene 2, I thought cutting here made more visual sense. Fail. My options in scene 2 were very limited. roughly a half dozen frames later I started to stand up on the pegs to avoid being tossed around by train tracks. Craning up and going into scene 3, which is back at normal eye height, is, again, soooooo wrong.
Oh yeah - one piece of serendipity (everybody's vocabulary word for the day). The applause at the start of scene 1 is on the original music track, and not my doing. I worked my way through the warning titles and the 10% speed as the very ground up deer goes by - didn't hit any of it AFAIK. I added the green scrubbing title, played this bit back, and discovered the applause for doing the quick scrubbing played at the right moment. Lucky me! See Alexander Blu's Concert (title) for the proof I didn't fudge this.
I hope the names in the opening credits produced at least a smile. I'm not sure I can talk Kay into doing another Side-Stand film, though. Only the costumer is the real deal, of course. The writer might just become the "Music by" guy. I found a Dickey F album on Jamendo... talk about go ahead Chicago blues! (For the humor impaired - think of an English guitarist, nicknamed "Slowhand", known for his blues chops... ah-hem, yes. If ya gotta explain the joke, it ain't that funny) When I asked the director to do another film, he lived up to his name.
OK, enough of editing 101.
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