Starting the Editing Process | Development

After our shoot week, we made a start with editing the footage together. Nisserin is the editor, and as the director I worked alongside Nisserin, making sure the scenes looked the way I thought they would. We both had the same idea as to how it would look, but we made sure to keep our communication consistent throughout, so we both could work out any problems or compromise if we needed to.

Nisserin started by putting the clips into folders (on premiere pro), and creating different sequences for each scene. I found, by doing this, it made editing a lot easier, and when it comes to editing the sound, which is my job, I won't have problems with finding each scene. She then added the clips into the sequence they belonged in, so we could see what each scene would look like.

The first scene (in terms of script order) we had footage for was scene 4 and 5 - both of these scenes were merged together in the sequence as they were both really short scenes. The last day of the shoot week, myself, Laura and Nisserin travelled to Whistable with our equipment to get some shots of the beach. The characters live in a village, by the seaside, called Farling Bay, so we needed some seaside type shots to get this fact across. Scene 4 is a montage of clips of the seaside village, and scene 5 is an exterior shot of Annie & Dean’s house. During the shoot week myself and Nisserin talked about the exterior shot and we decided that the shot we had previously shot from a test shoot would work well for this scene. So this footage was added into the timeline along with the seaside shots for scene 4. Then Nisserin started adding the footage in different sequence for all the other scenes we shot during shoot week.

During the editing process, we used a sum of 4 different monitors. We had availability to two Macs that were connected together, which meant we could have the sequence and editing tools on one monitor, and the video we were editing on the other. This was really useful as it meant we could make the sequence and tools bigger, which makes it a lot more easier and practical to work with. We then had the script open on my laptop, along with the take notes written by Laura once they were eventually uploaded onto our shared drive. Lastly, we had the shot list open on Nisserin's laptop, so we could look at our previously planned shot list, whilst making sure we were following the script correctly. We also could easily look at what take was the best through Laura's document, which made this process a lot quicker and effective.

When we first starting planning the editing process, and how we were going to edit the Multicam set up, we originally decided to use Final Cut - due to the Multicam editing set up it has available. However, before we started the editing of our footage it was bought to our attention that the Macs available to us had been updated, and in turn Final Cut had been taken off of the system. This obviously affected us in the way we would be editing, so we had to use Premiere Pro. This software also has a Multicam editing set up, so we spent sometime researching into and figuring out how it works. The instructions were fairly complicated, and Nisserin followed them but we got to a point where it was becoming too confusing and impractical. So it was decided we would just edit normally. This is disappointing as it would've been a good experience to see how the Multicam editing set up would affect our editing process, but it does mean we have more control over the clips we use.

After Nisserin made a good start on the editing, all three of use went through the behind the scenes (BTS) pictures taken by our photographer on two days of the shoot days.

The photographer went through the photos and placed them into three folders - 'Yes', 'No' & 'Maybe' - based on her opinion. We then went through all the folders and decided which ones should be moved or stay in the folder they were already in. This was a good chance for us to see how the shoot days went and also these photos will be useful to us for advertising and the submission requirements.

I'm glad we have started the editing at this point in the project as I feel it's still quite early on. This means we have time for editing the sound in depth and making any other adjustments when needed. It hopefully will mean that it won't be a rush to finish when the deadline day gets closer. I'm happy with the start that has been made on the edit, but there are lot of things to change and be added which will happen in the next part of the process.