Day 2 of Editing

Today, 30th of January, we started the lesson by importing all the clips/footage taken from our second day of filming, from James Lawleys'  USB stick, because we film on his camera and he wanted to edit the sound of the dialogue between the two characters Max and Jamie, as we thought it sounded a bit too quiet when listening to it on the night,and he has experience using a form of audio editing software called Audacity

After importing the clips onto the desktop of the Mac and then sorting them into out groups personal folder, Sam Warren and I opened up Final Cut Pro, accessed the event we made in the first editing lesson and began to add the last few clips of scene 1, which contained the two shot of Max and Jamie shaking hands, the shot reverse shots of the dialogue between the two characters, the low, tracking and high angle shots of Max climbing the stairs, the over the shoulder shot and long shot of him crossing the bridge and the start of his frightful journey home.

Though we had filmed a lot on day two, as expected we were unable to get through all of the editing and arranging of clips for scene 2 and the beginning of scene 3, but we did manage to chronologically order and edit the majority of scene 1. Sam Warren and I edited first while James Lawley and James Scott did some more research into the horror genre looking at ideas on how to make our title sequence stand out creatively in regards to radical positioning and movement of the camera and editing along with this.

Sam and I started off by using the arrow shortcut key to drag the clip of the two characters Max and Jamie, or as referred to in previous posts by their real names Zak and George, meeting into the timeline where we left off last time. This clip was quite short and didn't need much editing, however there was a long pause present at the end of which was cut out, in order to maintain the fluidity of the friendly, human interaction and conversation. We took it in turns to edit each clip we added to the timeline and gave each other constructive criticism when needed, if we missed something the other person spotted. Due to the long clips created by us directing them whilst recording, we were mostly cutting out parts where the actors were unready or we can be heard talking, with the exception of the tracking/follow shot clip, in which the camera appears for less than a second, around 40 seconds into the partly edited title sequence. We barely needed to edit anything extreme out of the clips we managed to get through in 30 minutes, which says that we have quite a good technique when it comes to filming and getting the shot right the first or second time, we rarely needed to take a shot again because we failed, but more so to see what it looked like in comparison to the other, and decide on the one that captures the moment better. Sam Warren and I finished our 30 minutes of editing, at the shot where Zak is being tracked and followed from the side by the camera up the stairs.

In the next lesson we have editing, I have planned and discussed with my group to try and finish editing the rest of scene 3 and, if we have had the opportunity within the coming week, to film scene 4 and 5, than we should be able to edit, at least, up to the beginning of scene 4.