Post-Production: Editing

Editing is the process of putting together the individual clips that you filmed during the production process. It is part of the post-production process and a very crucial aspect of film-making. Most people find that it is a tedious and strenuous process that they would like to skip at any costs. On the other hand, I love editing. It's my favourite part of the entire production process; in my group I seem to have taken over the role of the main editor. We do change from time to time, however during class time I usually end up working on the editing file most of the time instead of doing something else.

We usually made decisions as a group; Sam and I decided to copy the main editing file and start again because our first edit didn't look like what we wanted it to. That was mostly the main decision we had made, as every other decision was pretty much straight forward. We also logged the shots and checked which shots we wanted to have in our second thriller edit.

Before we started editing I actually thought that the clips would fit together better than they actually do, which is giving us a little bit more difficulty than first anticipated. As we do have to fit in 21 title/credit cards, this kind of solves our problem because it gives us the possibility to use them as transition in place of straight cuts in between different shots. This is all necessary for us to be able to create a proper thriller that can be uploaded to youtube and also for our coursework to be successful. To put together our thriller we are using Adobe Premiere Pro, and to create/edit the sounds, we are going to be using Garageband.

We started out by reviewing and selecting certain shots; out of the 55 we filmed, there are only around 11 or so which we can actually use for our thriller; the rest is discarded because they may not exactly look like what we wanted, or something went wrong during the filming process. In the long run this is going to help us save time when editing the actual thing, because we won't have to go back and look through all the shots to see which ones we need, and which ones are completely useless. Going back through all of the shots can take up a lot of time. This is also why naming and re-naming clips is actually quite important; we never went through and re-named our clips, even though this would have been quite smart because it would have saved us some time in the long run. Doing this gives you the ability to keep track of what shot includes what and which ones are useful, and which ones aren't.

To edit our thriller we placed the shots on the timeline – this enables us to put the different shots together and to see what they would look like cut and put together. This is useful so we can estimate what the final product would look like put together. We laid out the shots in the order that we thought they should be in; this can help us save time and see what the possible sequence could look like. Also, the different “channels” help you to put the clips together without accidentally cutting over another one. We are currently working with three channel layers because it makes it easier to have an overview of the entire timeline. Whilst editing, even though we are editing with different channels, we have had to crop all of our shots. Some of the clips we filmed go on forever, to a point where people eventually get bored of the video or feel uncomfortable, and others might not be needed, or appropriate, for the final cut. To cut down the clips we either used the intro (“I”) and outro (“O”) commands, which give us the ability to cut down the clips whilst they are still on the clipboard, or the cut/razor/blade tool for when the clips were already on the timeline and we didn't think that certain parts of these clips should be included. We also used the razor tool to cut a few of our clips in half because we have had to slow parts of our clips down and cutting them made it easier for us to get the result we wanted to. This helped us with our shot composition because that gives us the ability to re-cut every single clip that is on the timeline without there being a big hassle; this way we could make them look right after we had added them to the timeline.

For us its a little bit more complicated to put the clips together properly because we don't quite have the linear storyline many other openings have. We have to pay extra close attention to the actions within and the movement of the shots, then match them and for the video to flow properly. This is why we also have to use black title cards, because otherwise the transitions wouldn't be quite as smooth and it would be evident that the video has been edited. As an editor your main goal is to put the clips together to an extent where the viewer would not notice, and with our thriller it's very difficult to do that successfully. It can either go really well or could fall apart entirely.