Editing- First Few Days

First Few Days Of Editing

When arriving in the editing studio the first thing we undertook,  was looking through the entirety of the footage. We began by watching through the clips and then arranging the footage into bins, placing the material we liked in one and then taking them and slotting them into chronological order as we obviously didn't film it in that order.  When reviewing the footage it gave us all a sense of achievement and relief due to our final piece coming to an end. When watching back all the footage we felt extremely thankful that we took the shot ,from the perspective of someone looking out the window, due to this appearing really effective and after talking and trying things out we are considering using nearly that whole take throughout the sequence.

There were a couple of mistakes, whereby during the police scene we disregarded the 180 degree rule which meant that we couldn't use all of the footage, this was a slight problem, although we soon resolved it by cutting a few shots. Additionally there was one or two shots which I noticed the composition was slightly wrong or the character was in a different position than they were seen to be before. Fortunately, we had taken far more shots that we had ever anticipated and therefor this did not really matter. Moreover, on the day, a few of our actors were unavailable due to Covid, so we had to cast a few of the crew in their places meaning that there were less people behind the scenes and we all had to help during the process of filming, this resulted in being a positive thing when editing as it became easier due to having a minimal cast making the footage easier to organise.

When starting the editing process,  we had a clear idea of  what we wanted to do/create. While ours was a  title sequence of close-ups it also had narrative so did have a particular order. We started off by placing the close-ups of the bike/ crime scene followed by more clips they gave an idea towards the narrative. 

For the majority of the time filming we followed our shot list which helped us when editing as we were able to put the shots in order quicker, due to the sections of footage from different takes, being close to one another. By making this shotlist prior to filming it allowed us to have a clearer understanding of what we needed done, eg-  the composition, what type of shot and the positioning of characters. This pre preparation resulted in not only a smooth filming day but also made sure everything ran smoothly in the editing suite and our minds being at rest due to being certain we have everything we need.

We made a couple of changes to the original concept, that hadn't previously been discussed, the best example was the introduction of slo-motion throughout the closeups as we felt this would create an atmosphere of suspense and tension for the audience, highlighting the painful detail of the tragedy it also cut out any sense of shaking the camera may have picked up. 

Now having had placed the majority of our sequence in order and having chosen and edited all the clips we wish to use. We now have the two major choices in regards to music to respond too. This leaves us with the questions of what non copyright soundtrack are we to use? , and how are we going to match it up to the action on the screen?