Editing

I started editing the film after day two of shooting, I got the first half of the film off the Arnold server and edited it together as best I could up to where we had finished shooting. I left music and sound effects until I had the rest of the film, so that I didn't have to edit around sounds just yet.

After day three I took the rest of the footage and began editing in earnest. I started, as I usually do with looking through each of the clips, and labelling them appropriately, then I can clearly see whether they are outtakes, seconds of nothing or usable footage, and what is going on in each shot. I then organised the shots I decided I was going to use roughly on the timeline, trimmed off the 'action' and 'cut' segments and watched it through. I then cut out any useless footage, seconds of silence where nothing was happening, points where the actor had broken character by smiling or looking at the camera or there were unwanted background sounds. I then rewatched the film again to see where I was at.

At this point I just began tightening up the action, making sure that there was always something on screen that was showing progression of the story and shortening the film as much as possible, as it was still over the limit.

Next I had to gather together the sound effects and music I was going to use.  Most of the music and sound effects I ended up using were free downloads, but some of the music, such as the music used in the opening credits I would have had to get permission from the artist for if this was an actual film.

The hardest part during the sound editing was getting the music that played from Vinnie's phone to sound realistic. Because the original song I used was deep and bassey I had to manipulate the track so that it sounded distant and tinny as it would when coming from someone's phone. To achieve this I used another program called Adobe Sound Booth. I had never used this software before and it took some time to get to grips with it, but eventually I managed to manipulate the track into sounding like it was coming from a phone and echoing round a stairwell. If I had time I would have tweaked the sound slightly between the stairwell shots and the outside shots to get rid of the cold echoes, as it wouldn't echo like that outside, but it proved too time consuming for such a small change that would likely go unnoticed.

 A problem I found while editing was that the sound of the dialogue was at times too quiet to hear. I attempted to rectify this in the edit by making the sound levels higher at these points, but there’s only so much you can do in an edit and by making the sound levels higher overall I was also increasing the background noise, making cuts between shots painfully obvious. I realize that the problem was that the microphone was not close enough to the actors and so did not pick up enough sound. The best way to fix this would have to be a retake, or for the actors to rerecord those lines exactly as they said them in the shot and layer them over, making them loud enough to hear.

Trying to get the sound and especially the music and sound effects to match well with the visual element was the hardest part of editing, as it is harder to tell what point to start or stop the music compared to how you can clearly see when to cut visual footage. Because of this I don’t think the music and sound effects are as good as they could have been for my final edit. This is something I need to work on.