The Editing Process: Post Prodction

Editing Session 1

I think we were all surprised by how long it takes to edit a sequence and the complications within, which may in some cases result in the need to re-film (the case with our sequence). We begun by importing all of our footage into final cut pro. At this point we knew that we were missing some of the important dialogue scenes as we ran out of  time for these so we made a decision to edit all we could in our given time, whilst simultaneously arranging a day to finish all of the necessary footage. Opening with the establishing shot, we cut up the introductory shots of the sequence, alternating between the protagonist approaching the antagonist in the office getting ready for the protagonists entrance. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we discovered the convention of a quick editing pace used in action movies to capture and maintain the audiences attention at the same time as building tension, which we put into practice during the opening. We also thought from the movies we'd seen that entrances in the action genre mean a big deal, and they're often emphasized through high + low angles and up beat music (added later). When we came to editing the entrance we realized we didn't have enough footage to fill in between our principal "foot" shots which was the perfect opportunity to use one of the cliché conventions of action movies.

Editing Session 2

I felt that towards the end of this session we began to envision the "bigger picture" in our minds and started to think about how we were going to finish this on time. We began coming up with ideas for music and distinguished the areas to which we wanted to add this to, however no official song had been chosen. We continued with our piecing together what we could of the dialogue scenes and flash backs, having edited about two thirds of our sequence in total. I think this was the least productive session, looking back on it now- simply because we could only do so much without the footage we needed and our official "unit 2 filming session" would be the next day. We encountered a problem during this session, where we discovered that whilst importing our footage the camera had cut certain parts off whilst loading which presented the problem of reimporting our footage (mentioned in an earlier post).

Editing Session 3

I think this session was the most productive. I really felt we worked hard after having realised how little time we had left and how much we wanted to create a successful sequence. We managed to edit the entire sequence except for a couple areas we had left to finish off, but all in all, we had the main shots in place. The music was the main addition that made the difference to our little action movie, I was surprised by the vast difference it made having it there to support the exaggerated entrance we were trying to portray. We encountered a couple other problems to do with continuity; I remember one case, where we either needed to obtain another shot to tell the audience the character had walked over to the desk, but we didn't have the extra time to film. So what we did was we lengthened the shot before and overlayed the sound of footsteps, then switching to the shot of the character in front of the desk. This particular part of our film was an important one as we got one of the best shots here. Another problem was with the shots of dialogue following- our actress had said the wrong line in this shot but the composition was brilliant- the dialogue started out correctly but she ended it the wrong way, yet in the other shot the line was said correctly but the composition wasn't that good. It took us a while to decide what to do and how to solve this so finally, we cut the messed up one in half, so we only took the best part of the dialogue from this,then we switched to the other shot. Apart from that we were focusing on perfecting the editing, adding in effects and looked out for continuity errors (there were quite a lot to do with filming that we couldn't fix).

Editing Session 4

The only thing we had left to do during this session was tie off all the loose ends we couldn't in the previous. This included- carefully reimporting some of our footage in the areas where we left markers