Editing

In the following blog post I will be going over the whole entire editing process for our opening sequence.

So what exactly is the editing process? Editing in film is part of the creative post-production process, it is used to cut the footage into a fully refined piece of media. Traditionally editing was done with working with physical film, splicing and joining it to make one continuous video, but now editing is all done digital. The role of a editor is to work with raw footage and select shots and piece them together in order to make a finished motion picture.  

Before editing we had certain expectations that we made for each other. We all agreed that we should all take a roughly equal amount of time editing, and if another member of our team was unaware of a feature or process we would teach them how to do it, this would enable us to both develop our skills, and make our contributions to the post production more worth while. 

During the editing process I personally decided that it would be important to organise the clips into small montages, and then later piece them together so that the clip would would be a full opening sequence. I also decided that it is vital to use colour grading wishing the sequence, and I decided that we need to use it so that the colours can connote the correct connotation, such as the fact the girl is not alive, or dressing herself.

We had to set out objectives before the post production, this is because we needed to have a direction, and way of working that will properly utilise our time editing. Our outcome of editing was as follows “to create a sequence of clips, seamlessly edited together so that it can both engage, and hook a audience to want to watch the full film. We will also have to work with all aspects of editing to display the correct connotations, so that a audience will know what type of film it is and how it will play out”.

We decided to first review and playback our shots to see what we had got, and to make us to think about our selections before making them. We found it increasingly important to think deeply before action, and to make every ‘click’ count.

We used Adobe Premier Pro, this utilises a timeline. The timeline is a invaluable feature that allows you view, reorientate, sort, and make fine adjustments to the video, once exported this will make a finished motion picture. The timeline is were all of the utilised clips are stored, and displayed, it is a place were you can reorder, trim and make any change to the video, it is fully editable, and playback from the timeline is only referenced from the original media source. A timeline is a way of viewing your video in chronological way, and it is also displayed in a hierarchy fashion.

We decided not to crop any of the footage, this is because the footage was shot in 1080p, and we did to to reduce the quality, because it will be a lower resolution. We also made sure that the shots were perfect framed before actually filming so that we would not run into this problem, we were aware that this diminishes the quality, and we did not want to work with large file sizes.

We fully utilised the cutting tool. In Adobe Premier Pro it is called the razor, this essentially allows you to cut a clip to the desired frame, it can be used with the keyboard shortcut, or by locating it to the right tool bar, and clicking to cut. The tool essentially allows to refine and select the important parts of the recorded clip, all of this allows you to taylor the shot composition to the editors liking. 

We ordered, and arranged our shots in a weird way; we first craned the clips into mini montages, and then ordered the these together, we were told that this is rather unconventional, but it seemed to work, and was efficient. 

We used the timeline to view a graphical, and chronological ‘map’ of our clips, it helped us to fine tune our video so that all the clips were perfect tin duration, and selection by the frame. The timeline allowed for us to provide continuity, by allowing us to move the clips around by the frame to effectively match the action of a previous clip, it allows you to make it look like you are using a multi camera setup, for example if you have one long shot, and then you cut into a closeup you can move the clip by the frame to make the action match. On the timeline we decided to use 2 key layers, but for the more complex scenes we used 3 layers, the reason for this is so that we can work with multiple angles.

We added titles, we did this by using the built in tools within Adobe Premier Pro, we did this to all the audience see the key famous actors, and the famous crew, that would allow a audience to want to see the film based upon the reputation of the cast. To research how to do this properly we looked at other clips at the start of thrillers, and concluded that we should use a basic type font, and for each name to only last a few seconds.

To get the non diegetic audio for the sequence we went to the record player, and hooked it up to a computer running garage band, this allowed us to record the audio from the record player. We checked the copy write laws and they allow us to use the track because it is over a certain age. We also re recorded some of the audio so that it was perfect and did not contain the background noise. We utilised both non-diegetic, and  diegetic audio, we also used sound bridges for both diegetic, and non-diegetic audio, for example we start off with the record player the needle drops, and the diegetic audio starts, but then the clip cuts to the tap with the audio from the record player still playing, this is a sound bridge.

We used a match on action approach to the editing to and us with continuity.  We used a eye-line match approach to the editing, and this allowed us to have one thing as a establishing shot then the next shot that item being used. We did not use this all the time because we found it slightly excessive and that it would not work always in every scenario.

We have attempted to create a digests in the opening sequence by making the audience slowly aware of the fact that the girl is not doing the makeup herself, but she is dead, and it is being done by a man.

We have tried to keep the effects to a minimum due to both time, and the fact that we could do a lot on camera instead of doing it in post helped us minimise the time that we spent implementing it, we also thought that it looks more real if it is done in real life instead of just adding it on a computer. We did use a small amount of colour correction, and grading to make the footage look more authentic. 

To maximise suspense we start off the sequence with long duration shots, and then gradually reduced the duration of the clips, this gave illusion that things are getting faster. 

We wanted to keep things simple, and did not want to run into cross compatibility issues, to do this we only utilised 3 pieces of digital technology; Garage Band (for audio), Adobe Premier Pro (for video titles, most audio handling, and video editing), and Video Compressor Pro (to compress the video files properly, and effectively).