Editing Workshop review

 

Editing plays a major part in post production of any film -- because our opening sequence is simple but also fits the horror convention editing will be significant to build tension and make the climax moment at the end more dramatic. To help with this we attended a workshop on editing, where we put together and organised different clips from something we had filmed a few weeks prior.

A lot of us didn't really know where to start, so we began with some simple steps; how to trim clips, get them in the right order and got the basic gist of editing. This was probably the most challenging part for me, and I still don't feel I've understood it properly. As we moved on we tried some audio transitions and this worked okay - the final product turned out very messy with some random black screens and the audio wasn't working too well. I was working with Olly and as he's been assigned the role of editing in our actual coursework we've decided to take some extra time to properly learn how to figure it out - to make the transitions look cleaner and more professional. 

The specific issues we were faced with stemmed from the lighting we shot with - the white balance was wrong, lighting was too dark and we didn't have enough material to make a good edit out of so we ended up using 2 sequences to put together.

The skills we were taught included unlinking the audio from the shoot so we could make the transitions cleaner and more fluent. We learnt the 'I' key for in and the 'O' key for out to trim the audio and delete unwanted clips. 

We followed the 180 degree rule as best as we could but because we didn't have very  much footage to work with, this was a slight challenge in the first clip although we learnt from our mistakes and in the second half of our editing sequence we did better on this. The first clip where there was b rush as a prop  -the footage was filmed against the 180 degree rule which made it significantly difficult to edit to this rule. However the second one with Laura and Raff was filmed correctly so we were able to edit this better. If we were to do this again we would probably have to reshoot some of the shots to make it easier for us to edit in a coherent way that makes sense to the audience.

When we are editing our actual coursework sequence, the main thing we need to focus on is making sure we have enough footage and that it'[s all filmed in the right way. We can also make sure the white balance is consistent and the lighting looks natural (as we will be filming in daylight this should be relatively easy). We will take more time to make sure the footage looks like its all in a one fluent series and this should make the editing process easier so we can enhance the horror convention to its full potential.