Editing Reflection

This post will explain my creative journey through the editing process and the decisions that I made along the way. 

Film editing is part of the creative post-production process of film making. The term film editing is derived from the traditional process of working with film, but now it increasingly involves the use of digital technology. As one of the film editors I had to work with the raw footage, selecting shots and combining them into sequences to create a finished motion picture.

In our first editing session, we were given a quick reminder of how the editing process works, some rules and tips on how to approach the editing and then a reminder of how to use the editing software; Adobe premiere pro. We began by watching though all of our footage, the technical term for all of the shots we have is called the rushes, and so be began by watching all of our rushes. This was important as sometimes what you think you shot on the shoot day and what you actually shot on the day.

We then started piecing together shots and selecting shots and beginning a logging process. Logging involves collecting all of the desired rushes and spacing them out into a very rough idea of the flow of the narrative of the final piece. This is usually used in the professional industry so that if anther editor is brought into the project then they can watch the timeline and have an idea of what the narrative is and where the story is going, whereas if you just start editing from the beginning then this makes things difficult for other editors on the project.

After beginning to piece together our footage and begin the logging process we discussed our ideas of what we wanted the sense of the scene to be and what order would work best for the shots we had. We did this by watching back the shots and deciding where in the narrative the shot would work best or whether it would work well at all. We referred back to our original idea using our shot list, storyboard and scene outline. However, some of our ideas had started to change as we began the editing process and we discovered new ways of interpreting our footage and we discussed various options.  

In our second session, we began by watching back our progress from the previous session and discussing what we were going to do next.

Before we continued to piece together our shots it was important that we made a duplicate of our first session, which would be entitled our first cut. This ensures that we have a safe copy of what we did last time just in case we want to go back to our original or in case we lose anything we know that we have it backed up in a different cut.

When logging some footage of the psychopath that we intended to use at the beginning of our sequence we discovered some continuity issues with these shots. Unfortunately, our actor had done different actions in different shot and this created some issues with the continuity of the scene. I suggested t the group that we can avoid these issues by cutting between the psychopath and the victim and that way we can avoid the continuity issues as the audience won’t question whether the psychopath changed hands when carrying a torture weapon or if is facial expression or positioning has changed because he may have moved or changed during the cut to the victim. This aided us in avoiding the continuity issues and still being able to use lots of the various shots that we had of the psychopath. This then led us to create a new edit of the psychopath’s entrance using different shots and using my idea of cutting between the psychopath and the victim to avoid continuity issues.

In our third session, we again began by watching over our progress from the previous session and then discussing as a group what are targets were for this session. I suggested that we started logging the inspector scene and so we began piecing together the rushes from this scene, including a variety of angles and cutting between different shots. We discussed as a group what would work best and then we worked in turns at editing the shots and bringing the rushes down into the timeline.

We then discussed a possibility of a change to the ending of the sequence. We discovered a very effective and captivating shot of the psychopath putting out a match using his tongue. I suggested that this would create a much more dynamic, effective and possibly a much more thrilling editing to our sequence than our original idea of the psychopath’s hysterical laughter blowing out the candles. We took some time discussing the possibility of a new ending although we left this decision until further along in the process to see whether it would work best with all of the other footage. 

The next stage to the post production process is to continue logging and then start cutting and editing the shots in more detail. Our targets for the next few sessions is to finish the logging process, start to edit the shots at more in depth detail and finally we need to discuss our opinions and thoughts on the possibility of a new ending to our opening scene and whether we want to stick with our original idea which was to have the psychopath blow out the candles with his hysterical laughter or whether we wanted to change our idea slightly and use the highly effective shot of him putting out the match with his tongue. 

In our fourth and fifth sessions we started off by watching back our progress from the previous lessons and discussing our plan of action for the two sessions. We continued to edit the scene between the inspector and psychopath by cutting between the two characters using the razor blade tool to cut the shots in half and this allowed us to add shots in between. In addition to this we also made a duplicate of our second cut and started working on a third cut and this allowed us to save a copy of our previous work but also start editing a new version to see the opportunities we had and different options we could create. In the next session we need to start considering the audio and what we are going to do in terms of soundtrack and dialogue.

In our sixth session, as with all of our sessions we began by watching back our timeline and reminding ourselves of what we did in the previous session. We then made a duplicate of our third cut and after some discussion we decided to make a clean cut of our third cut. We decided to do this because our previous cut was very rough and messy and some of the audio clips didn't match up correctly with the video clips. We rearranged our clips so that we alternated between having a shot on V1 for the video and A1 and A2 for the audio for that shot and then the next clip would be on V2 or V3 with the audio on A3 or A4. This allowed us to organise our shots in a much more efficiently manner which will make the process a lot easier when we begin to work more on the audio including soundtracks and dialogue. We also, in this session sorted out some more continuity issues and deleted some of our shots by trimming them down or simply removing them from the timeline. In the next session we need to continue with the trimming and cutting process and also discuss our ideas for the audio and titles part of the post production process.

The intended outcome of this process is to create a two minute opening sequence to a thriller film using a range of different technologies and software as well as gaining more knowledge about the editing process and post production in general.

It was important that I made some key decisions for the group during the editing process. One of these decisions was the idea to change the ending of our opening sequence to the use of the effective shot of the psychopath putting out the match with his tongue rather than our previous idea which was to have the psychopath's hysterical laughter blow out the candles. I decided to do this as this was a much more thrilling and captivating sot and in my opinion it would serve much better than our original idea at creating an effective and shocking image for the audience to be left with. Another key decision that I made was the decision to start our opening sequence with a shot of the psychopath rather than the victim's feet, as in our original idea as just like in the previous example I believed that this would serve as a much more effective and striking opening image for the audience as well as establish the mood and atmosphere of the scene and create suspense right from the beginning.

There were some expectations set up about the editing before I started the process on one which was to constantly save the project to avoid loosing any of the work we had done and in addition to this we were expected to make duplicates of the shots and make several cuts of our opening scene. This enabled us to save what we had done so far and then start doing something different with the footage whilst keeping a copy of our original cut in case we wanted to return to the original idea. Another expectation that was set up about the process was that because this project is done in groups it was important that we shared the workload equally between the members of the group, that way we could ensure that every member of our group had a chance to explore the technology and software as well as having the opportunity to contribute to the final copy. Time management was also one of the expectations that was set up before we started as we knew we would have a very limited time to edit our opening sequence and so it was important that we used the time that we were given very wisely to ensure that we got everything done to the best standard it could possibly be. This also meant that we were expected not only to edit in our lesson time but also to use the edit suite and software available in our spare time in order to ensure that the project would be finished on time.

The technology that we will be using during the post production process are Adobe premiere pro, Sound editing software such as Garagebands and Soundclouds as well as font and titling softwares.

We started off our first session by reviewing and selecting our shots and in all of the following sessions we start by watching over our progress on the timeline. We decided to review an select our shots to remind ourselves what we had shot on our shoot day as often during this process what you think you filmed and what you actually filmed can be very different. We also decided to start the process by logging our shots as this way we were able to get a rough idea for the flow of our narrative.

The timeline is used to combine and order the shots. We used a timeline when ordering our shots as you can separate the shots into audio and video. it also, as the name suggests gives a guideline  as to what the length of each shot is, which in turn gives you an indication of how long the entire opening scene is.

We decided to name our clips and we know that naming our clips would make it easier to find what we were looking for and it is also a good method of organising the shots, which makes the process go a lot smoother.

The framing of the shots did influence whether we used the shot or not as we wanted to use a range of different camera angles and movements to add variation to our opening scene but we were also aware of how we could use the connotations behind each of the different camera angles in order to help get across some character information or information about our narrative to the audience which would make our choices of frame and angle more effective.

We decided to crop some of our shots and we did this to avoid continuity issues in some cases and also to add to the suspense of he thriller by using quick, short shots which would provide a better dynamic to our opening sequence than if we left the shots as they were originally filmed.

In addition, we also used some cutting tools including the blade and the razor and this digital tool allowed us to either cut down the footage or split the footage into two. We used the razor tool to cut the footage at a particular point which allowed us to either split the footage into two parts or to make it easier and more accurate to cut part of the shot.

So far we have created a rough cut of our opening sequence to the thriller and the next stages are to look at sound, transitions, title sequences and finally to have a closer look at continuity issues. So far I am really pleased with my groups progress and I believe that we have made good headway in the post production and editing process.