Short Film, The Editing

During the editing of the short film, I had to learn fast how to use Adobe Premiere, as I had never used this software before.

The cutting and arranging of the clips was easy enough, the process being the same as most video editing software, however the tool arrangement was new, and there were a great many tools I had never come into contact with before, such as the rolling edit and advanced audio and visual effects. Learning how to create proper titles and edits was also new, as was co-ordinating the timeline along with the clip list.

A problem I found during editing was that at one point in the interview, the inspector speaks over the witness; this made editing the cuts here very difficult. I did my best to disguise the jumpy audio, but unfortunately there was no way to fix this without cutting the section out completely. This could be avoided in future by doing a retake of any overlapping voices and asking the actors not to speak over each other. The part in question occurs in the video at 03.18, the end of the scene where Edgar is calling for the dog.

Another problem I found while editing was that the sound in the interview room was far quieter than the outdoor sounds, the monster sound or the security camera sound. I attempted to rectify this in the edit by making the sound levels higher at these points, and lowering the levels at the other parts, but there’s only so much you can do in an edit and I realise that the problem was that the microphone was not close enough to the interview table and so did not pick up enough sound. Again, the best way to fix this would have to be a retake.

We also made the mistake of filming in 1080p widescreen, when we had to edit in 720p 4:3, because of this, some of the shots which originally looked brilliant, lost a lot of their quality and were far too big for the frame and as a result, sections from either side of the shot were cut out. Next time I should check the settings of the camera to ensure we film in the right ratio.

For the CCTV shots, we researched how the shot should be positioned by watching CCTV footage from real police stations, we also used this footage along with inspiration from the film ‘The Fourth Kind’ and clips of supposed alien sightings to determine the amount of grain to use and the positioning and font of the information display on the screen. This also inspired the colour correction, with the washed out, greenish tint.

Something I learnt that I think would be useful to me was the ability to manipulate a layer over an image using Photoshop, and import this on top of your video. This really helped me with some of the effects, such as the dark ring around the edge of the frame in ‘Monster Vision’.

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.

When I stared editing the first thing I did was to get all the clips cut to the right length and put in the right order, then my plan was to start adding effects, however what I found was that the amount of footage we had far surpassed the required length for the brief. So, as a compromise I created two edits, the full length version, which is the story from start to finish with the entire story. And a second edit, cut to just under five minutes. The short version is the story cut down to just the main plot elements with fewer atmospheric shots and shortened interviews. Both versions are uploaded to Vimeo, but only the short version is on this blog.

Short Film, The Making Of

Making this film took a lot of out of lesson hours and a lot of organisation.

The first thing we had to do was come up with a story set around the given brief, and create a storyboard showing the progression of the plot and noting possible shots.

Once the storyboard had been presented to the group and the selected to become the film, we arranged a meeting on the Monday to discuss the idea and write up a shot by shot plan of the sequence of events, including ideas for special effects that we could use on the shots and how the camera angles would affect the action.

After this we looked up footage of horror films on YouTube to get an idea of how other film makers had used sounds and effects in their work in order to get a reaction from the audience. These films included The Fourth Kind and Alien Sightings for the security footage, and Predator, for the Monster Vision.

The next thing we had to do was enlist actors and find locations to film. We got in contact with Phil nodding, and he agreed to be our police officer for the film, we also found two candidates to play the Woman, one was Krishna’s flatmate, a drama student, and one a Film student that I knew. Unfortunately, the drama student cancelled the day before the shoot, so I got in contact with the film student, and she told us that she was only available after 3pm, so in the end I ended up having to play the part.

Finding the locations to film was comparatively easy, the arboretum was used for the outdoor filming, and it so happened that there was a perfectly positioned bench for the woman to fall asleep on, surrounded by bushes, providing the monsters cover. And a room inside the Waverley building was the perfect size and shape for the interview room and was free all day after 12.

Another problem we encountered was that the member of our group tasked with writing the scripts hadn’t shown up to the planning meeting, and so he didn’t know about the changes made to the plot, so I wrote a backup script in case the script he had made was inaccurate. As it turned out he didn’t show up for the actual filming either, and so the backup scripts became the only scripts.

During the filming the man we had playing ‘Man with dog’, Edgar, was only available until 2pm, so we had to film all of his parts in the morning, before meeting up with Phil at 12 to film the interviews. We were also lucky in that a passing woman was kind enough to lend us her dog for the film.

Editing the footage took three days in total, the first day was spent organising the shots, getting them cut down to the full length and put in the right order. The second day was used to add in the camera effects and shot transitions, the most difficult part of which was creating the monster vision effect in Adobe Photoshop and importing it into Adobe premiere, because this took over an hour to render. On the third day I took the full length video and cut it down to the bare minimum trying to keep the story, as in the brief, the film had to be three to five minutes long.

The bit I like most about the video is the end, because it had to speak to a singer song writer to get the song that played at the credits made specifically for this film.

Short Film

Our task for DP1 was to design and make a short film about a woman who loses her shoes. we were split into groups of about five and given three week to plan, organise and film it.
This is our attempt:


Out Of Fright - Short Edit from Becky Pike on Vimeo.