Editing 22-10-10

During today's lesson, Sophie, Laura and I decided to continue editing our footage.

We edited up the to first chorus which means we spent a lot of time editing the pre-music footage and flashbacks of Joe and the girls. We also cut down and selected the footage of Joe and Emily that we wanted to put into the first verse where Laura and Charlotte are performing.

Although most of our time was spent editing the pre-song footage we felt that the overall result was good! We did come across a few problems and difficulties, these were:

1. The shots were too long. A lot of the shots of Emily were too lengthy and long.The tone of the song is slow and sad but we felt that this bit needed to be sharp and edgy to make it more dramatic.We got around this problem by using jump cuts instead of continuous shots. Normally we wouldn't use this type of editing but we found it looked more effective as it flowed and moved quicker. It doesn't look odd because they have been put together very well and makes her exit from the house more dramatic.
2. Making good use of the 2 corresponding cameras. The footage we edited today was shot from two separate cameras, this was mainly done to make the shot-reverse-shot look smoother as we didn't need the actors to repeat their lines more than once. We at first found it hard to work with the two reels of footage on the editing line, but I suggested that instead we should drag the footage from camera 2 to the split screen and simply pull the footage down from there. This made editing the 2 cameras together much easier as it allowed us to work with camera 1 on the main line and just add the additional footage as and when we needed it.

3. Deciding the lengths of the flashbacks. In the first verse we decided to use the shots of Emily putting the case into her car and driving off. At first we were unsure whether to try a continuous flow like originally planned or stick to the jump cuts. After talking and thinking about it we felt that due to the fact we only wanted short shots it would look most effective to do the jump cuts. It took us a quite a while to edit the footage to the perfect length, we then asked our teacher once or twice on her opinion as to whether certain shots (the one of Emily from inside the car) was too long. She said she thought it was too long and we should go for the quick-cut editing therefore we adjusted it to shorter lengths.

Effects we used today:

Zoom: The transition from the reaction shot of Emily to the start of the song needed some sort of transition to link the 2 together better. We didn't really want to use white dip, black dip and cross dissolve as we already have them in our production. We looked through the effects list and decided to just try some random ones out. The first one we tried was zoom, we dragged it from the effects list to in between the middle of the 2 shots we wanted to link, we then dragged it in to reduce the length. The effect this gave us was then a quick zoom into Emily's face that then zoomed out to Charlotte's extreme close up. We luckily really liked this and decided it was a good way to establish the pre-song footage ending and the actual song starting.

Reduced speed: We wanted the emotion of the actors to come across strongly therefore we decided to reduce the speed on the close up reaction shot of Emily's face. There was only 1 decent shot of Emily and it was very short, so we tried reducing the speed to make it last longer and portray her sadness more effectively. We did this by right clicking the footage box and clicking the speed/duration option, we then reduced the speed number to 50%. This worked quite well, as it made the shot the length we wanted to it to be.

Increased speed:We decided to increase the speed of the shots of Emily reversing in her car and leaving the drive. We did this because we found that although we did reduce the shot lengths, the movement was still too slow for what we wanted. We tried increasing the first shot to 150% and the rest 125% and found this worked really well. It didn't look as if we had deliberately sped it up but looked as if Emily had reversed quickly.