Post Production Journel - Editing

Editing Hour 1

We spent the first hour importing clips from the camera, this took up most of the hour as we had a lot of clips that we had filmed. Once we had finished with the importing we began piecing together the establishing shots which showed the location and the first glimpse of the characters. Looking at the conventions of the action genre, short quick shots, tension builds, and fast pace editing sequences were needed to grab the attention of the audience. We achieved this by using the razor/blade tool to cut the clips down once they had been put into the timeline. To create the establishing shot we probably used about 5 clips altogether, which we just chopped up and placed in an order which became our string opening sequence. We also started to think about continuity and match on action as we tried to match the footsteps of the protagonist throughout the sequence so there was no jumps, and obvious continuity errors. at this point, we had more that we needed to film to make all the dialogue flow, due to the room changes during filming. So we started piecing together some of the dialogue of the antagonist, and placed markers where we wanted certain un-filmed clips to go.

Editing Hour 2

In this hour we decided to  familiarize ourselves with the tools used in final cut pro, and began adding effects to certain clips such as the flashback to make it look like it was a dream. We also used this time to place all the clips we had into our timeline so we could see where and what else we needed to film. it became clear that most of the dialogue for the protagonist was missing, and so we set dates to film it all. We also needed little filler clips to improve the flow of the sequence.

Editing Hour 3+4

We used most of this time to perfect the clips already in the timeline, and started thinking about the type of music used in action films, which is fast paced, with a good beat. we started to research theme songs to action films and cam across our music we used for the opening sequence which was 'The Little Things' by Danny Elfman which is the theme song for the action movie 'Wanted'. we put it at the start of the establishing sequence and found out that it matched the footsteps of the protagonist perfectly, which adds more tension to the sequence. It was also in this time, that we realized that some of the beginning of the dialogue later on in the sequence had been cut off, so we had to re-import the cut off clips again  creating a new bin so they wouldn't get mixed up with the other clips already imported. We had to do this several times in order to get the clips we wanted. we also wrote out a checklist of shots we had to shoot so that we didn't miss out any, and that we were prepared for when we decide to shoot.

Editing Hour 5+6

In these hours, we worked on finding a song to go with the flashback scene which had to match it perfectly so the audience would recognize that its a flashback. In the end we decided on 'Too Close' by Alex Clare because of the tension building at the beginning of the song. we also added a sound effect to the flashback which is the sound of the gun shot, which we had to make sure we placed it perfectly into the sequence otherwise it would play at a random time. Another thing we did with this time is makes the credits sequence which did by getting funny blooper clips of all four of us and then freeze framing it on a funny face or moment and the name would appear of the group member at the bottom of the screen. We also added in the 'Little Things' chorus of the song to play at the end so it gave an upbeat positive ending. We also added another tension building track to the ending of our sequence to create tension and mysteriousness. This was a track from the movie 'Inception' called 'Dream Is Collapsing' which is composed by famous film composer Hans Zimmer.

Editing Hour 7+8

We used these final hours to polish any areas that hadn't already been polished and experimented further with visual effects such as adding flashing to white before the flashback to give the audience some insight as to what is going to happen. We also played around with the audio effects adding things such as the chroma key to other sounds, and fading the audio after searching for a long time, we found the right sound we wanted to achieve for the voice-over section when Mr. Ripley was talking to the receptionist over the intercom.