What they achieved:
1. They edited up to the First Chorus, and spent the majority of their time editing the pre-song footage.
2. They cut down and selected the Emily & Joe footage that we wanted to appear in the First verse, where Laura and myself are perfoming.
What went well?
(Taken from both Laura and Jodie's blog's)
Although we spent the majority of the two hours working on the pre-song footage, we felt that the over-all result was good. However, we did come across a few problems and diffculites... these were:
1. The shots were too long. We found that a lot of the shots of Emily were too lengthy, and although the tone of the song is slow and sad we felt that this bit needed to be sharp and edgey to make it more dramatic. We did this by deciding against using continous shots that flowed to using jump cuts. Ordinarily, we would not use this type of shot when editing, but we found that it worked in making the flow move quicker; we felt it did not look odd because the footage itself is of Emily moving out of her house dramatically.
2. Corresponding the two cameras together. The footage we edited today was shot from two seperate cameras, this was mainly so we could film the talking scenes as one whole thing as opposed to us doing shot-reverse-shot with one camera where we would have to get the actors to repeat their lines more than once. We at first found it difficult to work with the two reels of footage on the editing line, but Jodie suggested that instead we dragged the footage from camera 2 to the split screen and simply pull the footage down from there. This worked well as it allowed us to work with camera 1 on the main line and just add the additonal footage as and when we needed it.
3. Deciding the length of the flashbacks. In the first verse, we put shots of Emily putting the case into her car and driving off. At first we were unsure whether to try a continous flow like originally planned or stick to the jump cuts. We analysed the situation, and felt that due to the fact we only wanted short shots it would look most effective to do the jump cuts. It took us a good 10 minutes manipulating the footage to get it to the perfect length, and we asked our teacher once or twice on her opinion as to whether certain shots (such as the one of Emily from inside the car) was too long. She preffered the quick style editing, so we adjusted it to this length.
Effects used:
We felt that we needed some type of transition from the reaction shot of Emily after the cheating flashback to the start of the actual song. We decided not to use white dip, black dip and cross disolve as we already have them in our production. Looking through the effects list we found zoom, and just tried it to see what it looked like. We dragged it from the effects box on to the edit line and placed it inbetween the reaction shot and the extreme close up that starts the song; we then dragged it in to reduce the length. The effect this gave us was then a quick zoom into Emilys face that then zoomed out to Charlottes extreme close up. We luckily really liked this and decided it was a good way to establish the pre-song footage ending and the actual song starting.
2. Reduced Speed. The close up reaction shot of Emilys face was something we felt was essential to the story after the flashback scenes. However, we only managed to obtain one decent shot of Emily doing this, and it was of quite a short length. As there was not much happening in the picture we decided to reduce the speed of it to pro-long it. We did this by right clicking the footage box and clicking the speed/duration option, we then reduced the speed number to 50%. This worked quite well, as it made the shot the length we wanted to it to be.
3. Increased Speed. When we edited the shots of Emily reversing in the car and leaving the drive, we found that although we reduced the shot lengths down, the car movement was still slow in comparison to the pace which we were going for (the first one in particular). So, to ammend this we increased the first shot to 150%, and the rest to 125%. This worked well, as it wasn't fast enough to look like it had intentionally been speeded up, but made it look as if Emily had just made a fast maneouver in her car.
(End of information taken from Laura and Jodie's blogs)
How do I feel about the production so far?
I believe we are on target to meeting our deadline for our first draft. The girls worked very hard during this editing time and with two more days booked I believe there will be a positive outcome. If we dont manage to edit the whole song we shall hopefully have some good quality shots and something to display to the class.
1. We have both used extreme close ups
3. We have both used a forest shot, (low angle)
4. We have both used a forest tree as a prop.
5. We have both included a dance sequence.
