Editing Review

Editing Review

Editing for us began as soon as we finished filming, on Wednesday the 1st of May. This is when I sat for around 4 hours and put all the footage we had all together, to make a 9 minute video of all the footage with light editing. After this, we all sat and reviewed our footage, and it was clear this editing process was going to take some time if we wanted it as polished as possible. However the whole post-production with me downloading all the footage onto my T5 Samsung High-Speed SSD which Bence and I would be editing off of and on my laptop with an i7 8th gen Intel 6 core processor, running at 5ghz, with now and upgraded with 32gb of DDR4 Ram running at 2400Mhz (ideal for 4K editing). The download process did take some time; this was because I back up my data manually three times, the first is an off-site backup located at my Dad’s house, a five-minute walk from my house, which is simply a slow 5400rpm hard drive, which I plug into my HDD docking station. Second is online – OneDrive and finally is another 7200rmp HDD that I keep at my house. So, this process is a long but worthwhile one, as I have had a failure with a hard drive and SSD before.

Secondly, after the footage fully downloaded, I made the 9-minute edit then after the reviews we got to work on the final product. As mentioned in an earlier blog for this I needed to edit in a quiet room that we rented out in the library. We rented out the library because the song we were working with was a stereo track so headphones would have been no good for me as I'm completely deaf in my left ear and have been since birth. So, I needed to play the sound out loud on speakers this was so I could hear the full track. Bence and I soon started making the process, completing the first scene which we had changed around a lot since we first put it together. This was because I found another clip I did not realise I captured, which was a movement downwards from the Memorial Hall window revealing the forget me not flowers, a very aesthetically pleasing shot to begin the music video with.

We eventually got to our first transition, which was the red spray paint into the car transition, which I have also written lots about on my editing reviews. In short, we had to make some changes here to make the sequence smoother by adding in another shot of the actors, editing and shortening the shots where the transitions should be. However, I do not need to go on about the changes we had made as they are all in my other blogs, what I would like to write about, is how things went.

Bence and I spent around five days nonstop editing this music video, over two weeks of college, one being the end of the first filming week. I think we worked well together and with the rest of the team making sure other team members input would be seen in the final edit, this was especially present on little things that Kasha picked up on. Bence and I did not like the fact in our last scene, there was some red in the newspaper showing, this we sorted by taking the red colour completely out of the shot, keeping the blue of Archie’s jeans. We also noticed If you look at his hand closely, it is in black and white, that is because there is red in the colour of our skin. The editing filter we used took the red entirely out of the image, although this was unnoticeable to the casual viewer, Dan (our teacher) could have seen it, so we had another crack and made the image colours a little more natural compared to how it was initially.

Finally really the only other things to reflect on, is again how well we really polished the edit, making sure it was as cinematic as possible, going over it, again and again, making sure no shots were shaky, as I hate to shake, that is why I only film on a Steadicam, not really handheld, which is still really tricky. We then test screened our video on the projector after rendering for the 6th time, with final changes, like the Pink Floyd logo at the end of the video and other subtle colour changes to the drone scene, where we saturated the images a little more to fit our style. The test screening went well. This was after Chris (the Media technician), and I dialled in the correct colour settings to the main projector and fixed the brightness issues which had been present on previous screenings, that I was fed up with and finally fixed!

On the whole the editing process had been an enjoyable experience where I learnt a lot about all sorts of transitions, like the zoom into the Morgan light, the tree transition in the woods and my favourite, the dolly pull backwards transition, this was a pain to Frame up correctly between the two shots, one with Paul; and one without. We polished this edit, this I was proud of, we did get to the point where I could no longer make changes. That is how I knew our job was done, and we handed in our project one week early, that did feel great, and we could not have done it without the 200% effort, our whole team and our actors put into our project!