EDIT WEEK

The editing journey was long and arduous, but ultimately very rewarding.

Having missed two essential editing lessons, I was a little behind in my ability to edit. I was confident butting together the ends of two clips, but not confident about much beyond that.

I decided to be proactive and prior to filming, I looked online at YouTube tutorials to teach me some of the basics and then further refined my searches for specific skills I was likely to need that I’d identified in my pre-planning; importing animated text, basic colour correction and grading and creating a sliding split-screen effect using keyframes. This was incredibly helpful and enabled me to get ahead of myself when the time came to edit. 

My final Premiere Pro timeline

Some oversights missed during the filming process made for some difficulty when editing, specifically the sound. I had forgotten to attach the shotgun microphone to the camera, so had no sound to sync to. This meant manually syncing to the visual meeting of the clapper in the video, which also wasn’t always possible due to space constraints of the filming positions. In total, I estimate that this took somewhere around 4/5 hours to correctly match the audio to the correct video files and in total around 10-12 hours to complete the initial rough cut of the edit.

I also used effects and the effects panel for the first time during this edit and would even say that I improved through the duration of the edit and refined my ability and confidence in using them. 

Playing around with colour grading and trying out a more strongly graded style.

I also made multiple edits with variations of grading and musical choices to try and emphasise certain emotions felt by the Character. Here's an example of one of my considerations, I ultimately felt the tone was too heavy to fit in with the rest of the scene. You can check that out here...

Be warned, tears will fall.

The edit also posed difficulties in other respects, too. I spent a lot of time trying out multiple shot types and merging them together in a way that felt as seamless and cohesive as possible. I of course came to the conclusion that there were key shots that I'd missed and that some information wasn't clear to the viewer. When entering the shop, it is meant to be clear that the "Tough Girl" is stealing. Due to the narrow aisles, it was hard to efficiently show this information to the viewer while also following Juno and introducing Rollo as he delivered his first line. I made the decision to focus on the two lead characters in the scene and extended the scene prior to the "item drop" in the final version so that the viewer could see the beginning of the items falling out, which I felt was the best trade-off that I could make.

Here's the shot that could have been cut to...

Douse thine eyes in Video goodness.

I uploaded some of the practice edits to YouTube for reference:

https://youtu.be/-FxzS1Abzx4 

https://youtu.be/eMNN1EAqs50

https://youtu.be/u7QFjHhhdOc