Editing Process

After filming all of our shots for our thriller movie we then started our editing part of the project. We started by log and capturing our footage onto the programme Final Cut Pro, whilst noting down the tape log on a piece of paper. This doesn't take long to do so we thought that the rest of the project will not take very long. we were soon proven wrong.

Once we had our list of shots in Final Cut Pro, we started to piece together the footage into the order we wanted it to be in. We placed every shot we needed in the correct position. Then we started to test out effects that we could add to our film. The main feature of our opening was that the main character was shown in a dream and also in reality. We wanted an effect that could connote this to the audience so that the could easily differentiate between the dream and reality.

We began searching through the effects that we could use and we wasn't impressed. Half of the effects were rubbish and some made no difference to the footage. But then we struck gold. We found an effect called extract. We thought this was great because it is a black and white effect but also it made the picture seem also surreal. We applied this effect to many shots and was very pleased with what we had done. That's when all the problems arose...

The footage that was all put together was about 3 and a half minutes long! We had been told the limit was 2 minutes and a 30 second leeway. We had to set about cutting down the sequence. As we watched it back more and more we realised we didn't need as much walking as we had and cut that down, but the sequence was too long. We then resulted to cutting out some shots that we thought we could actually do without.

Then more problems arose. Whilst editing, we decided to invite some friends to watch the footage so far. After watching, they told us that they did not understand the idea of our opening, which was extremely frustrating. We could not even pass the opening for enigma, the audience were completely clueless as to what was going on. This is when we changed the order of our opening about 3 times, until the audience finally understood what was happening.

When we had the newly shotened 2:20 opening, yes 2 minutes and 20 seconds. We added more effects and transitions between shots. We also added some sound effects such as a phone ringing and glass breaking. We thought that we needed some music to add to it so we looked on the computer database and found some music called 'Ghost Train' which we thought suited our thriller and also built up suspense.

The last thing to do was to add the title and credits and to do this we used a prgramme called After Effects. We had fun using this because the effects were easier to use and were the type of effects we really wanted to be added to our opening. We added a few morw tweaks to our opening and finally the project was finished! :)