Day 1 of Editing

After our first day of filming on Monday the 12th of January, since we were using James' camera he took it home, connected it to his computer and saved the footage we had recorded onto his memory stick, so we could edit what we have filmed do far using the Apple Mac's and a type of professional video editing software called Final Cut Pro.

Later in the week, on Thursday the 15th of January, James Lawley brought his memory stick into school and before the lesson he plugged his flash drive into the USB port of the Mac and imported all of the recordings onto the desktop, which were than sorted into a folder we created, making it easier to identify our clips and to access them.

                                                        
After sorting all the clips into our personal folder, we opened up the  video editing software we are going to be using, which was Final Cut Pro, we created a new event then imported the footage we wanted to edit into it, scanning through them to help us remember the order they went in and analyzing whether or not we needed to re-film any of the camera shots or movements.

Due to there being four members in our group and there being little space for all of us to be sitting around the same Mac, we decided that we would take it in turns to edit the clips together in teams of two, half an hour for each two members to take turns editing our title sequence together each lesson we get a chance. While one pair is editing, the other two members would be doing more research around the horror genre as well as updating their blog.

For the first day of editing Sam Warren and James Lawley began editing first and James Scott and I did some more research, giving us some ideas of how we could improve the production of our title sequence. After 30 minutes, we reversed roles letting James Lawley and Sam Warren add to their blogs and research while James Scott and I added to the progress Sam and James L had made and trimming down moments in the clips where the characters were just standing around, or you could here the audio of us directing the actors on on screen. This was done by using the blade tool to cut sections of clip that were unneeded or unwanted, of which Sam and James Lawley had missed. As they had worked so quickly and professionally, there was very little that James S and I needed to do in regards to adding clips, however after sorting all the clips together in chronological on the timeline we noticed that it came to around 35 seconds, and the end title sequence must only be 2 minutes long. Considering that this is only our unfinished first scene we recognize that when completed, our title sequence will end up being a lot longer than 2 minutes and have decided that we will go through and shorten it down once we have pieced it all together at the end.

James Scott and I ended the first lesson of editing with Zak and George, Max and James, meeting up before the section of dialogue begins, as we were unsuccessful when trying to capture/record the audio on the first day of filming we had no more clips to add and had cut all we needed to from the ones already structured in the timeline. Also after improvising the script on the first day of filming, James Lawley took the time to write up the script for the two actors properly so they knew specifically what they needed to say, making it less likely they would get confused.

For the remainder of editing lessons we have we will stick to this rotating scheme of two people editing and two people researching as it seems to be very effective, helping us progress at a faster rate, which will give us more time at the end to refine it, letting us make sure it is to a good standard. For the second editing lesson, as a group we intend to finish editing the rest of the first scene, especially the dialogue and hopefully move on to editing the second, and if we need to we will arrange to complete the editing in any spare time we have.