Account of editing

Shorty after our filming day for our thriller, we started the editing process. We loaded up the footage from the camera onto the computer, and loaded the clips up onto Final Cut Pro, where we planned to edit our thriller. We then divided up our shots into two folders, logs and rushes. In our log folder we put the shots which we liked and we felt we were almost definatley going to use. We then put the shots which we weren't so great into the rushes album. In this folder we also put the worse shots of shots which we had more than one of. We did not want to delete these shots which weren't the best ones, as we thought we may want to bits of them in the later editing process.
We started the editing off by placing our tracking shot at the beginning of our thriller, as we had filmed a number of these shots, we used the one out of our log folder. This shot helped establish the fact that it was an eerie and desterted loaction. After this, we used some of the closer up and more detailed shots of Anna and Paul putting things into the car. This editing was intentionally done quite slow paced in order to create a contrast with what was going to happen later in the film. We then used a shot from Anna's perspective of Paul in the container, to show how they are running away and hiding their things in big containers. In this shot, Paul says to Anna 'can I have help with this one?', however, in the shot which we decided to use because it had the best camerawork, you could not really hear him say this. We therefore looked in the rushes folder to find the other second take which we had done of this shot. We took the sound from this shot, and after eliminating the sound from the shot which we already had inserted into the sequence, we put in the sound of the other shot from the rushes folder. The sound on this take was a lot better than from the one in the log bin, and therefore made it sound a lot better. After this we decided that rather then just using the shot of Anna and Paul putting the silver box into the car, we would use another shot which we filmed and had put in the log folder, which was from inside the car. As we switched the editing from a shot outside the car to inside the car and back to outside the film it looked a lot better then it would have if we had edited it to have one long shot from the outside of the car, which we had filmed. After this, we decided we wanted the tempo to start slowly increasing. We therefore edited some shots together of Paul picking up another bag from the container. The edited these together so they moved at a slightly faster rate to the shots which we had already edited at the beginning. After this, we used some extreme close up shots of Paul closing the container, keeping the pace of the editing up, to make it seem that his actions were becoming more urgent. We then took two shots from our log bin, one of Paul entering the car shot from the outside, and another of him entering the car but shot from the inside. We edited these 2 shots together in order to create a match on action shot, where we see Paul opening the door from the outside and then getting into the car from the inside. The next scene to happen was the scene with the majority of the action. The first time we edited this scene, we put together shots of Anna and the assasin in order to create the sense that they were both after each other. However, after rewatching this scene we decided that we had not created the nessecary pace which we needed in the edting. We therefore deleted the edting of this sequence which we had done, and recreated the scene. We used cross cutting between the assasin and Anna, using shots of no longer than one second of each of them, so that it cut quickly between the both of them. Altough this sequence caused great trouble for us while editing, as it was hard to get the right pace, we were pleassed with it once we finally achived the correct pace, in turn creating tension and an interesting action scene. For the final shot in our thriller, we decided to use a shot from our log folder of Paul on the floor while the car drives off in the background. We decided to use this shot as it gave the sense that Paul was a weak and innocent victim, highlighting Anna as a femme fatal and a character in control.
After we had finished editing the camera shots and were happy with them, we needed to edit the sound on each shot.We started with sound, we had to go through every single shot and chose between which sound clip was better for that shot and then double it up and level it out between left and right. I found this a very long a tiering process, which I did not really enjoy. After doing this, we moved onto the non-digetic background music. I found this more interesting than editing the digetic sounds, as we got the chance to create our own music for it. We created a soundtrack in which the sound and pace of the music increases in time with the increased pace of the action. We didn't go for downbeat music, we however gave the sound more of a 'rock' theme, in order to make Anna appear as a more attractive and dangerous figure. We also used special effect sounds such as gun shots and the sound for the reloading the gun. This empasised the theme of violence in our thiller. I found adding in these sounds a lot more interesting than leveling out the digetic sound, as it gave us the chance to be quite expressive.
After this, we used after effects software to add in visual special effects. We used effects such as fake blood, muzzle flashes and smashing glass. We had to use belnding modes to alter the density and colour of these effects, and for the blood we had to mask around the outside of the mans body. We also had to mask around the window for the muzzle flashes so it didn't look like this was coming from inside the car. We also added in the title at the end of the sequence at the end of this, using after effects software. We decided againt using credits as we wanted people to focous the action rather than the credits. Although this was extremely time consuming, I found it quite fun as it produce some very interesting and good effects which looked believale when we rewatched it.
I thought that the editing process was overall quite difficult and challenging, altough I found this quite interesting as we got to see our origional plain shots progress into a sequence which looked smooth and believable. I feel very happy with the end result, and feel happy and glad that all the time which we put into editing paid off. I thought overall we all worked very well as a group as altough at points we had different viewpoints, we were often able to put these together and come up with an idea which we were all very happy with.