Editing Preliminary Task - Part Two

Editing Preliminary Task 

We carried on with editing our preliminary sequence until we had a finished film. 

We continued editing, by adding different shots. We cut to over the shoulder shots from over both characters shoulders and used extreme close ups to emphasise the characters emotions. We became better at cutting a shot during a movement, so our piece began to flow much more smoothly. 

However, we ran into a few difficulties during our editing process. Unfortunately, we realised that we had not filmed a shot to show the girl actor reaching for the projector button, only a shot of her stretching for the button. This mean't that when we came to editing the piece, we had to use a jump cut from the boy actor leaving to the girl stretching for the projector. This made the piece seem very ambiguous and disjointed, as the last shot didn't flow with the rest of the piece. We tried to include a second of black screen in between the boys exist and the shot of the girl, but this made the jump shot more apparent, so we left it how it was.

Due to this problem, we had to alter some of our other shots to make the last shot seem more fluid. We decided that if we zoomed in on the boy characters exit, and then cut back to the girl, it would imply that time had passed and the girl had already reached up above her. However, we didn't have a close up shot of the boys exit, so we had to do it on Final Cut Pro. This lead to the shot becoming unfocused and reduced the quality of the piece. 

Additionally, we had problem with sound as one of our shots had "cut" said before the end of the shot. This meant that we had to cut sound from another similar shot and added it to our chosen shot. This was complicated as we had to ensure the continuity of the sound, so we spent a while making sure it sounded correct within the piece. 

Moreover, we realised that we had made the boys exit very ambiguous as we had not filmed what he was clambering over. This would have been easily fixed by tilting the camera down a fraction, but we only realised the problem when we came to editing. We couldn't do anything about this, so we had to deal with the fact that the boys exit would have to be vague.

For all the problems we faced, I was quite happy with our final piece. It wasn't as good as I hoped, due to us missing some vital shots, but as our first go at filming and editing a piece I was really pleased.

I also learnt that next time we need to ensure that:

 1. Plan out all the shots we wanted to do

 2. Make sure we film movements, with editing shots together in mind

 3. Make sure there isn't empty space in a shot

 4. Wait until the shot has completely finished before saying "cut"

 5. Remember to re-focus the camera before each shot