Editing
Editing this term has been a great experience for me as I have learnt so much! During the first week of editing, I was not so confident and spent more time observing how to use the software and then having a go at it myself. Capturing shots has become very simple now, and I am much more confident with trimming and cutting each shot and placing it on the timeline. The first week of editing helped us experiment with our shots and the order that they would go in. We also edited in the shower sound bridge which works really well. Once we edited a rough sequence, we were able to see what works for continuity, and what doesn’t, for example in some shots it was raining when in other it was dry. The lighting too varied in the shots, the street becoming darker by the end, which did not look very believable or work for continuity. The first week of editing gave us an idea of what we needed to re-shoot.

After our second shoot, we added our new shots of Laura in the steamy shower into our originally edited sequence. Alice and I also began to add titles (directed by…starring…etc) and we learnt how to add key frames when using the fading effect. We played around with fonts and colours and we also added brightness and contrast to all of our shots making them look much more professional and of better quality. Alice had a lot more time to edit in her free periods as a lot of mine clash with 12E’s lessons but I try to help as much as I can during our lessons. Unfortunately, Mel had been very ill during this week but overall I think we made quite a lot of progress. We still needed to redo Barney’s street shots and add them into our sequence.

Finally, after having taken Barney’s shots we entered our third week of proper editing. Mel was back and well =) We edited in a different shot distance of Barney in-between the crosscutting. Alice, in her free period, also added in the dialogue and tried to synchronize it with Barney’s lip movement, which I think she did really well. However, unfortunately at the end Barney says something different in the Audio and Video so we may have to re-record that after Christmas. Alice also found a soundtrack, which we added on Thursday, and having gotten much feedback, everyone including Miss Thrasher thinks it works really well. Personally I love the sound track as it makes everything seem much slower and really builds up the suspense giving it an eerie atmosphere.

Overall Miss Thrasher said that our sequence is looking much better now, and that all the continuity works really well. She did however say that there were a few little things, which we could improve after Christmas but nothing major. This was a good end to our term of shooting and editing. One thing that continued to annoy us was the camera sound throughout the sequence however a helpful classmate, Nick, said that we could solve this problem by lowering the treble so we also need to remember this for after Christmas. We also plan to add in some Foley sound if we have time for better sound quality.

In general, I am much more confident with editing now, including cutting and trimming shots, adding sound, adding fonts and using effects, and I look forward to adding those final touches to our sequence next term.