First days of Editing

The first day of editing, my group sat down at our designated Mac and opened up our project to review all of the footage, I would say this was strangely one of my favourite moments from the whole process - at this point we had left a two week gap since our shooting day, so this gave me enough time to look at the footage from a fresh perspective, which only added to my excitement as it now involved an element of surprise. 

We were all extremely pleased with how the footage had turned out and immediately started piecing together what shots looked best onto the timeline, separated by smaller sequences e.g. one for the action of ripping her sleeve off, and another for her chase sequence. Our choices for these orders were fairly straightforward as we had shot them in mostly chronological order, with the last take of every shot being the overall best one. 

We also generally filmed only what we needed, with a few exceptions of some establishing shots we didn’t use as we didn’t want to add to our already slightly long run time, as well as some extra close ups for our last shot in case we decided against the idea of a single long take, which were a CU of Mike’s boots stepping into the garage and dropping the axe into the ground to drag off screen, and another CU of Meadow’s terrified expression in the car before reaching out to open its door.

As we began placing and cutting these shots together into their respective sequences, we started noticing a few very minor continuity mistakes, which thankfully weren’t enough to be considered irreversible, but would prove to simply be tedious to fix, particularly with our often perfectionist nature - luckily this didn’t get in our way as much as I worried it would since we were mainly just so happy with the footage in general and were very excited about how cool it all looked.

Once we had finished a rough cut of the whole project, we ran into the slight issue of an overly long run time of 3 minutes, meaning we had to sacrifice the short sequence of the Survivor pulling out the car parts to put into her bag, instead cutting straight from her opening her bag and finding the zipper broken to pulling up her wounded leg onto the car hood. Whilst it was unfortunate that we couldn’t include those props that I particularly liked the look of, I wasn’t too bothered by this as it wasn’t fully necessary to the story and the scene still ran smoothly without it, we also had plenty of other visually engaging shots to make up for it. 

Our first few days of editing proved to be extremely productive and effective as we had essentially already cut together the finished product (minus the titles and audio editing of course). However, I was slightly disappointed in my own lack of involvement in these first crucial days since my Private Study slot took place just when another Media class had to edit, whilst Max and Joy shared their slot and were able to produce incredible amounts of work in a short period of time, so when I properly sat down with them after just one session away I was both extremely impressed and somewhat guilty for not having contributed as much as I could have since I had effectively passed the responsibility onto them.