Editing Evaluation

Soon after we had finished filming we went straight into editing our thriller. Firstly we started looking through all the shots we had taken on the day and deciding if they were worth using or not. Our group would judge this on things like if the camera shook, how good the focus was, continuity, etc. With all of the shots that we decided not to use we made a separate folder (which we called “bin”) instead of deleting them, just in case there might have been something we could use later on. With all the shots which the group thought were good we labeled and the ones we especially liked we would put a star next too or even two if we though they were really that good.  Whilst we were doing this we were thinking about all the different directions our thriller could go and determining within the group what shots we could use where in order to make our thriller opening sequence more effective.

The majority of our thriller only involved our male leading being alone in the room, this is what we decided on anyway while editing.  While he was alone in the room we kept the pace slow but it gradually became quicker which lead up to when female lead would walk into the room. Although firstly when we he was alone in the room we used editing techniques like match on action when he is putting his gun in the draw, looking through papers and calling a number on the old fashioned phone. We did this to build up the suspense and try and suggest to the audience that he was panicking and something was about to happen. When our female lead entered the room we used an eye-line match to show that this was what the detective was looking at and then a shot reverse shot when she points the gun walking towards him. We used this technique in order to show the perspective of both of our characters to our audience. Another thing we did while editing was increase the pace of when Dyanna walks into the room by once again using match on action by quickly changing through a number of shots.

In our thriller we clearly wanted to show that Dyanna was the stronger character out of the two. We did this by using the low angle shots looking her looking up at her giving her more power and status than we used with the Detective when all the shots we high angles looking down on him making him look inferior to her, giving her all the power. We also used close-ups on their faces to try the expressions which could hint to the audience more what was going on.

With adding in the sound our group seemed to really struggle for various reasons. Firstly we had to make sure that the sounds such as the clicking of the typewriter, dialing of the phone and Dyanna’s one line that this could all be heard over the music which we wanted to put on top without sounding out of place and then on top of this we had to make sure that the music matched the action that was happening on screen. The all the speech that we had within our thriller we made sure that they were equally balance to both the left and right speakers, then balanced them by deleting all the ones that weren’t good of which we copied and then panned so we had the same amount of volume coming out from both sides. With our gun shot we first looked through a a lot of different effects , once we found one we cut it and panned it to fit the way we wanted to sound this also involved taking out some of the reverb. We then added it into our thriller making sure that it was in perfect timing with what was happening on film. For the music we struggled to find a suitable soundtrack. We spent time listening to many and some of them would of gone great but the only problem was that many were protected by copyright so therefor we couldn’t use them in our thriller. Therefor we decided to make our own modern version by using elements of what we heard in the others. We didn’t want the music in our thriller playing very loudly so therefor we cut it in some shots so we could hear the typewriter, dialing and some of the dialogue whilst doing this we also made sure that it matched the pace of our thriller. Insignificant moments within our thriller we used certain keys to highlight the importance of it to the audience to be able to build up the tension to the climax, which is a common technique used in many thrillers.

There were certain parts within the editing process which were easier than others. I personally think that the slower paced parts within our thriller were easier to edit because the places where lots of action happened you had to edit it so that nothing looked too jumpy or out of place but I think that it was good that we used Final Cut Pro to do the editing because it is a program where everything is quite straight forward and easy to use. I personally think that if before we had started filming had learned how to use final cut pro a little bit better and looked at all of the effects that can be used we would of done our thriller a little differently because knowing about the effects could of made it easier to do certain things of which could of made a big difference to the quality of our thriller.

I think I enjoyed the editing process much more than the filming because the editing was where you saw everything come together. When your filming you just have a bunch of shots randomly placed everywhere whilst while your editing its almost as if you get to see the thriller come alive because its what you have been working on for so long and you finally get to see the way you have imagined it but in some ways better because before you start you think of it as some huge complicated task that is set before where in reality it actually is quite simple to make it look professional and effective if you put a lot of time and energy into it.

In our group we didn’t seem to have any specific roles we kind of all did whatever interested us whether it was a particular scene, sound effects or sound track. Whenever a certain member of the group felt that a scene should go a different way we would let them show us what we thought, sometimes everyone in the group would like the changes but sometimes no and we would decide if we kept them or not by a group decision. I worked on some of the body of the thriller and also gave my attention to the detail and the continuity of our thriller.

Editing our thriller was extremely different to doing the prelim task, firstly if you compared to the amount of footage we had then and now its significantly less which made it a lot easier to edit. But I thought that editing our thriller was much more enjoyable this time because we could go any way we wanted with it unlike our prelim task.

During this process I didn’t only learn about how to edit but it made you realize how much time and energy can get put into just a few minutes of the film. I really enjoyed doing it but it also made me realize that probably in the future as a career I wouldn’t want to take up editing although it was so much fun do to and learn. I was really surprised about how easy using final cut pro was especially because I sometimes struggle when using programs such as this. I don’t think it was very hard to make our thriller appealing to our target audience because we used all of the elements, which we found through our research, were in