The Editing Process

When I planned out how the shooting and editing schedule would commence I predicted to have a much longer length of time to edit, roughly have 2 college weeks. We wouldn’t need 2 weeks but it would be good to have that amount of time just as a contingency, but due to delays and rearrangement of shooting days we only have  6 days to edit which was a major worry for me but once we started I realised that we had more than plenty time to edit everything.  Also some of our days got cut short due to the fact we had to help set up the exhibition but by that point we had almost finished.  Before starting any of the edit, we check listed all the footage seeing which ones where acceptable for use and which ones could be bloopers/behind the scenes.

 

 

 

 

 

When we did the hazmat scene before the actually shooting day so we first edited that before then, we made two versions of the clip, one with a black & white effect applied to it and another which is much darker and some of the colour was taken away. We asked a couple of students and tutors to look at both clips and got their opinion on which has more of an effect. The overall favourite was the black and white edit, which I personally liked as well. I may have already mentioned in a previous post but this clip is going to be used for after credits clip, like a hint for possible future episodes.

Once we had the rest of the footage we decided to go off into different MAC’s and work on a different scene individually, I wanted to work on the basement scene as I think it is the most crucial   scenes and wanted to have more control over them.  Jordan and Lewis were left to decide which scenes they wanted to edit.  By sharing the edit around we were able to edit more in the time we had, the only issue was that we had to share another MAC with another student and seeing as they had that MAC first they had priority over us, luckily the student would never come in until after dinner due to work I believe.  

The order I advised to do the edit in was; sequence, colour correction and sound. By following the script and storyboard the sequence process was very straight forward. At first I thought adjust the colour would be a pain to do but once I sussed the first clip, I could simply copy and paste attributes onto the rest of the basement scenes. There were a couple of clips which I had to increase the brightness and adjust the contrast as someone would lean too far into shot and lose light. For each shot we used two filter’s; brightness & contrast filter and RGB tone filter. With the filters it changed the room from an orangey colour to a yellow/ candle light colour. These made the scenes seem more natural and more authentic, increasing the illusion of the film.  Below is the difference they made.

Whilst editing we noticed a couple of minor continuity errors, I wasn’t going to mention them but as part of my reflection it best if I show I have noticed and mention how to prevent them in future projects. Simply on the next project I am going to make sure there is a director assistant which will note down all possible aspects that may have an effect on continuity , it is a simple idea but one that may be difficult. The continuity errors I notice are; candles, bottle, cigarettes, television & outside lighting. Also whilst editing I noticed to get a collection of shaking clips, this was meant to separate Tom running away and him falling down the stairs. They are needed shots but I haven’t got time to take out the equipment again and record so I had to make do with the two shots and add a shaking effect to the clips.

The last step was adjusting all the sound levels; it was simple enough until we added some downloaded sounds effects. For some reason the audio would either change to silent or be completely gone. It took us a while to sort out the problem, all we had to do was either put the audio onto another line or replace the audio with the same clip we used. We downloaded the audio from http://www.freesound.org/, mainly because the audio we got didn’t sound as genuine as the sounds off this website.

The overall editing process wasn’t that difficult, previously I found the process slow and demanding but maybe because this is my project and it is extremely important as it is for my FMP and for other reasons which I will soon reveal, that it came more naturally for me to produce. When we are back in college, we will watch it again and have a couple other students watch the final product and ask for feedback.