10th Of May Reflections + Editing Blog 1

10th of May, week reflections

Today I will talk about how our editing is going so far and a brief review of the footage I have edited with Bence Sandor. We finished filming on the 1st of May; it is now the 10th. In the space of nine days, our group have almost completed the pre-production folder with only a few changes left to make. I edited a 10-minute reel of the footage from filming week in the order that we would like it in for the final product and also edited up to 3 minutes of the final music video with a full rough edit due to be completed by next Wednesday the 15th of May.

I will begin with the first thing I did, which was to complete the really rough edit that I whipped together in around 6 hours last Thursday the 2nd of May. In this edit I was told by my group just to compile all the best clips into a short edit just so that they could see what footage we had captured, looking back I believe it went rather well and although the footage was 9 minutes long, people could sit through it, because of the variety of locations keeping people interested. I also had a crack at putting a grain and warmer colours over this edit, I think it turned out quite well, and the slightly overexposed scenes seem to work with our style. What this edit taught me was what a hard challenge this music video is going to be to edit for both, Bence and I. The footage is brilliant. However, there is tons of it. We have so much that we now have to use the extended version of ‘Money’ the song that we are making the music video for, this new song is six minutes and forty seconds!

Below is a nine-minute edit I made to show off all of our footage.

After this edit was completed, we had a green light, to begin with, the real deal. It was not that simple though, the footage the GH4 (my cameras) captured is of a high bit rate, which means it requires a powerful computer to edit the footage. I could easily edit the nine-minute version on my desktop at home as it has an 8-core overclocked processor and 32GBs of Ram. However, my laptop only has a 6-core non overclocked processor and 16GBs of Ram. This was not enough power to edit the footage, so I ended up having to spend some money upgrading the Ram on my laptop to 32GBs so that we could edit the footage at college on premier pro, compared to final cut on the Mac, which I do not like, because of the clunky OS.

We eventually began editing and after much advice and honestly not the best shots, we were stuck from the beginning (and still are). There are not as many opening shots that are as smooth as I thought there were when we filmed. Bence and I must have re-edited the beginning several times now, but we still can’t make it perfect, we need it perfect. I will try this weekend to find some shots that can lead us into the past of the senior men that flow, with the music and our style. This means I will be audio syncing for the opening scene and watching the footage over and over from the Memorial Hall in order to find the best clips and insert them in an order that makes sense with our laid-back style. A big job that I will complete.

Next up in the edit was the scenes of stealing the Morgan. You can see I the reel of footage above that it looks too easy to be able to break into the unit where the Morgan was being kept, this clip has been replaced in the final edit with one where Archie – the actor, breaking in, is finding it more challenging to enter the unit. I will also edit in a transition that zooms into the Morgan’s headlights and turns white to where the camera shows Joel and Archie sat around a table planning their next robbery, Bence and I then edited this scene.

We then have to correct the spray paint scene, which needs some changes. The changes that need to be made are when Archie sprays the red spray paint over the camera (a big piece of a glass table top that I sacrificed for the video)! The problem lies where Dan (my teacher) pointed out, that just before the red transition both Archie and Joel walk away from the wall. The shot should be both of them with an arm around one another, then Archie with his sunglasses on and Joel ducts down to pick up something, then Archie spraying over the lens with the red spray paint.

After this, we need to change the position of some of the drone shots, possibly after the café, before the spray paint scene. I think this would work quite well, as then it looks as if where they are spray painting is on a wall in some woods compared to on someone’s property, which it was originally. From the viewer’s point of view, inserting the drone footage of the Morgan here before the spray paint and after the café would make more sense.

Other than this, with regard to the editing, things are going well. I am just worrying too much about whether we will get it in on time or not, we will, but I do worry about it. We will have at least a rough copy of the edit by early next week.

The final thing that I want to update this post with is our pre-production folder progress. Things are looking good for this piece of work. I hope that we can finish it this afternoon, after I finish this blog post. We have a few changes left, one being we need to add a sentence now and then on top of certain pieces of work where we need to explain why we changed things on the day, for example, the usage of the more extended version of ‘Money’. Other changes include a few changes to our budget, which I will complete this afternoon as well as assembling the whole folder, adding in some photos of the locations where we filmed into the recces and communicational evidence.

That is it for today; things are going well; we have to keep it this way and continue to put over 100% effort into this project.