Post Production

Editing is the Post Production Process of arranging, selecting and piecing together all of your footage on the timeline with the addition of later adding special effects and diegetic and non diegetic sound effects and soundtracks.  During our editing process some key decisions that I personally made were firstly to make sure that I had a good opportunity to edit during both my classes and in my free time, which I successfully did as I frequently went up to the editing suite on my own to carry on with our editing process. Prior to the entire process I was already very passionate about editing and especially film editing so having the opportunity to finally be able to use the professional software at our school in the editing suite was both a daunting and exciting experience. Obviously I wanted to learn quickly to make our 'Opening Sequence' the best quality it could possible be. My second key decision was to make sure we all had an opportunity to work on our sequence during lessons; we were recommended to work in pairs so we weren't all cramped together around one desk so we decided to alternate who worked with who in each lesson as I felt more ideas would be shared and it would be a lot easier to work  in this way. However, it did seem to cause some problems occasionally as sometimes work from a previous day was changed a large amount the following day and others in the group disliked the new changes which had been made and the original changes had to be re-created. 

Before our editing process began, the expectations given by our teachers were that a lot of hard work and time would be necessary in creating a well edited 'Thriller', so it was essential to organise our time carefully throughout the process.  However, we did go off track quite frequently and we got behind in our work making it at times a very stressful process not knowing whether we were going to able to get it completed in time.

Our intended outcome of this process, especially for me, was to have both learned and created a thrilling and interesting 'Opening Sequence' that both reflected our time and effort which we put in and which I was also proud to call my own work.

During our very first session in the editing suite we first began the session with a brief introduction on the compulsory elements we were to do before we were allowed to begin our editing, including the simple task of creating a 'rushes copy' of our original footage in case any of the footage was lost and we wanted to go back to the original clip for any reason. After this we were then officially allowed to start moving our chosen shots down from the clip board onto our timeline.

The timeline is present to drag our chosen shots down onto it and then to put them in order of our desired format. From our footage we had numerous takes of the same shot so we decided as a group on the best shots we should use after viewing and analysing each shot numerous times, experimenting with different angles and then agreeing on the sections we could possibly use from each of the shots. At the very beginning we were told to put all of our shots into our order of our scene outline but throughout the entire editing process a lot of changes were made moving shots around our timeline as, for example, we wanted to set the scene before we revealed any revealing shots giving away any information indicating that the girl was dead prior to our scene with the muddied hair being washed out into the sink which I thought was far too unusual so close to the start of the opening sequence.

The majority of our shots were cropped because we wanted them to be a much shorter length than in their raw form. It was essential for us to definitely crop the beginnings and the ends of each shot as you can hear one member of the crew, usually Amr or myself saying the words: 'rolling', 'action' and 'cut'.

The razor tool is activated by either clicking on the computer icon or pressing cmd and c together at the same time on your keyboard. This tool, which we used frequently throughout the process, allowed me to easily split a clip at my desired point in the shot. By using this tool we were able to use the same focus point of the shot but then be able to cut to another angle in-between and then return to it similar to a shot reverse shot.

We wanted initially to make everything quite ragged within our editing to create a disturbing atmosphere showing how nothing was perfect, but after thinking about it during the process we were unsure if this was the right technique to include as we thought the build up using simply edited together shots used to reveal the girls true identity was more affective as it was less obvious something weird had been occurring.  However, we still used it in small montages, for example when the hair dryer used to dry the hair as we cut the shots into very small sections, as we wanted to experiment on the roughly cut style for some small montages within our sequence and then moved them around on our timeline to create a contrast to each previous shot to see whether if it was effective before deciding whether to apply the style to some of the other shots, for example like the lipstick scene.

Prior to editing we had already created a rough and an updated scene outline so we had a good idea on how our 'Thriller' would be seen on screen.  In relation to the timeline we moved the shots around it in the order we thought worked best for the audience with both good establishing shots and a climax within, constantly altering the order as we went along. This provided many continuity errors as everything needed to be realistic as possible for the watching audience; for example, in one shot, which we eventually had to delete, the costume was different to the next shot -  it would have been very confusing and annoyingly noticeable for both myself and the audience even though my group initially thought we could get away with it.  I, however, was not happy knowing it would confuse so after some persuading we all realised it was indeed the right thing to do and not include it. Unfortunately, during that same shot the Actress was also breathing during that clip when her character is actually dead so whether or not we found an alternate place to use the shot we still wouldn't have been able to use it because of this annoyingly small but very noticeable error.

As well as putting the Visual element into place, the Audio was also very important to cut and edit as we used a lot of diegetic sound effects which we recorded on the day of filming using a shot gun mic. Sometimes for the shots that didn't require sound, or if we wanted to use the sound from one clip for two different ones, I had to unlink the audio with the visual as, for example we only wanted one of the soundtracks from only one of our two taps running water shots.

With the use of the record player on the day of us filming we had used a piece of music from a Vinyl record which we recorded using the shot gun microphone but when in post production we realised we needed to find a non copyrighted piece of music, as the piece of music which we originally used made us uncertain if it was still in copyright and we did not want to take the risk when we could easily find a free source of music to use instead.