Editing

What is editing?

Film editing is part of the creative post-production of filmmaking. The term film editing derived from the traditional process of working with film, but now it increasingly involves the use of digital technology.

What we did

The first day we edited, we reviewed our footage in the bins by placing them on the timeline. Here, we used the arrow tool to go through and selected each cut that we wanted to use by putting it on the second timeline. Once having selected all the footage we wanted to use, we then created a new bin, which we called ‘real footage’ and duplicated it. This was so that we could play around with the footage, but if we made a big mistake or didn’t like anything we did, we could delete it but still have the original, non-affected footage.  We also re-named each part of the footage so that we could easily find them when we wanted to use them and to keep them well organised.

Editing Lesson 2

What we did

In this session, we started to put footage together to form small sequences, one at a time. We started with inside the car as we realised that this would take the most time.  We used the blade tool to cut our shots in the car, so that the pace of the edit which would be very quick, to help emphasise the speed and merciless killing in the car. This was also done as when the woman goes into the car, she feels relaxed, so that when the shooting comes along its also more of a surprise. We also decided on the exact shot composition, which we wanted to have by the end of the editing.

Editing lesson 3

What we did

Once we had decided on the shot composition, we could then start editing the big sections we made together, keeping in mind continuity and match-on-action to help make the transitions as smooth as possible. We did this by putting each rush into different layers on the timeline, so that we could zoom in and conjoin the two different cuts together as accurately as possible. We ended up using up to 4 layers to help to keep our cuts as smooth and as natural as possible.

Sound

We found our soundtrack using the website Soundcloud as the music on this website is not copyrighted and is free to use. We added this by downloading the soundtrack we had found, then adding it to our editing software. Our sound was non-diegetic. However, we used a diegetic sound affect of a gunshot that we got from an already downloaded file on our computer.

Titles

We added the titles at the very end of our editing as it was the quickest process and which required the least amount of skill and knowledge to do. These we simply done by clicking on the add titles button, where a choice of many fonts and styles came up to choose from. We added titles so that it would make our thriller seem more realistic as all movies have titles, and also to have a unique ending title, as our title fades into another name at the very end.

After Effects

The most time consuming part of our thriller was using the after effects of the blood splatter on the glass. In order to do this, we had to slowly match up dots around our female actors’ head wherever it would overlap the blood. If we didn’t do this, the blood effect would simply overlap her head and it would be extremely obvious that it was fake.