Account Of The Editing Process and Difficulties Encountered

We had a very stressful beginning to our editing process. Due to a technical malfunction, our time code was broken in several places. This made it very difficult to digitise the whole tape all in one go. So to digitise our footage, we had to isolate each break in the time code and digitise each section individually. This was very frustrating as it took a long time to complete, and set us back time wise by about a week.

Once we had digitised all our footage, we went about turning the rushes from one long continues video file into individual shots from the storyboards, this process is called logging. We decided to split all the shots up into 4 main categories of the four different locations, bedroom, living room, stairways and outside, and put them in separate ‘bins’. For the shots that we taken many takes of we also had to select the best take for the sequence, this was often very hard to chose. To make it easier when selecting the material for the timeline we named each shot with the type of shot and timing, e.g. Medium shot, Over Shoulder, 5 Secs.

When we had logged each shot of our 1 hour and 10 minutes of footage, we went about bringing a selection of clips from the log bins down onto the timeline. We stuck to the basic structure of the storyboards but had to vary it when we wanted to include some of the extra shots we shot on the day of principle photography. Our first sequence that we put together included far too much footage and lasted 6 minutes, having done some basic continuity editing, and this lasted too long so we had to start making some hard decisions of deciding what material we would get rid of.

Something that helped in this step is having different shots on different lines of the timeline so that we could delete and move around shots freely, this was extra helpful when it came to laying down the sound. Firstly, we went through a large database of un-copyrighted music and sound effects. We were specifically looking for music that sounded innocently scary to tie in with the theme of the innocent child being stolen. Most of the music was very short clips, so to make the music last longer we had to copy and paste the clips and cut bits out so that it sounded like it all flowed together. We also had to mix the audio with the ambient sounds that we recorded during principle photography.

The penultimate stage of editing was to put the titles onto the sequence. We had a slight problem with this as there weren’t many shots long enough for some of the credits as we have quite a lot of fast cross cutting going on, which reflects the production style mirroring content. We had to make sure that all the credits were consistent and the same size and font so that they all looked coherent.

The final stage was the phase that makes the product look professional and properly polished. You have to watch it through very carefully making minute changes to the colour, lighting, final sound and visual cut and the overall grading of the sequence. This makes the whole thing run together in a seamless and smooth style that shows the well-finished postproduction stage of our sequence. The grading stage adds a filter over the top of the footage that gives it the impressive filmic look and enhances the style and typical aesthetics of Hollywood high production values. All this finishes the product off with a properly professional look.