Post Production: Editing

This is part of the creative post-production process of filmmaking.

Three key decisions that I made in the editing process were:

1. We decided to change the start of the sequence from the shot of the victim's feet because when we watched the clip back, the candles we used looked fake and so didn't give off the creepy moody atmosphere that we wanted. To achieve this atmosphere, we instead began with the shot of Mike (the psychopath) standing looking out of a window as we felt this would add more mystery and suspense for the audience. 
2. I ensured that I watched back all of the shots that we had filmed before beginning the editing process so that I knew which shots we had and was familiar with the footage before I began the sequence. 
3. We also decided to change our original ending from the psychopath's hysterical laughter and blowing out the candles to him lighting the candles and blowing out the match because we preferred how this shot looked and thought it would end the sequence more effectively as it stayed more true to the character of the psychopath. 

Before I started the editing process I wanted to make sure that I set expectations so that I knew what I was going to do. I wanted to make sure I:

• Saved my work regularly. This is important because if one of the computers crashes and I haven't saved my most recent work, I will have to spend more time trying to redo everything that I have already done which could potentially make the quality of the editing worse as it would be rushed. 
• Worked effectively in a group. As I am editing with my group members, it is so important that I make sure I am telling them what I am doing so everyone knows what's going on and that everyone shares any ideas or thoughts to help to make the sequence the best it can be. 
• Log shots. Logging shots initially is very useful because it means that you can see what shots you have to work with and the ones that you are most likely to use will be "logged" so that everyone is able to see what they are working with and means that if people are picking up the editing from different points, they are able to see what has been done already.

Reviewing and selecting shots ensured that we knew what shots we had to work with and from this , we were then able to select the ones that we liked and were most likely to use. 

As our scene has dialogue, the audio is important but as a group we decided that we were going to work on the visual side of editing first to ensure that we had a sequence that looked good and then move on to editing the audio.

My group made sure that we renamed the clips. This is so useful not only to orgainse the clips for yourself, but when other people come to edit, they can easily negotiate the clips and work out which ones they want to use. This also made the process much quicker as we didn't have to continuously watch back the clips as it was clearly labelled what the clip was. However, when doing this, it is important that you are all aware of what each shot involves because labeling for one person may make sense but for someone else may not. 

The timeline is particularly useful in the editing process. The timeline is used to combine and cut shots together. You can extend the timeline to make it easier to organise the shots and watch them back. It also separates the visual clips from the audio clips, allowing you to edit them separately. This enabled us to see our shot durations and helped us to put everything together.

We then had to reorganise our timeline because we didn't have it in a neat, clean order which made it easy to work from. To do this, we moved all the visual clips to lines V1 and V2 and made sure that all the audio clips corresponded on lines A1 A2 A3 and A4. This will make it easier to work from when we need to match up the dialogue with the sound.

When we re-organised the timeline, we made a duplicate of the editing that we had already done in case we lost something or decided to change the order of any shots. Making a duplicate ensured that we could do whatever we wanted and all the work we had put in would still be safe.

When editing the end of the sequence we had to make sure the stab looked realistic and because we had used a retractable knife, this was particularly difficult. To solve this problem, we changed the speed of this clip to 150%. This improved the sequence because you only saw the stab close up for a few seconds, making it more tense and more dramatic for the audience and therefore added more action. 

We cropped shots to improve the pace of the scene and make it more naturalistic and more engaging for the audience. There were different tools to help make this process quicker and more simple. One tool that we used quite a lot is the razor tool, which enabled us to cut shots in half and we were able to change where the clip started and rearrange the order.  

We mainly used the timeline to watch the shots back once we had edited them but one helpful thing that we did was drag the line to mae the footage go slower. This meant that we were bale to see individual frames and so check to see if anything was in shot that shouoldn't have been, thus helping with continuity.