Editing Evaluation

We went through all our shots and chose the ones which we wanted to use, we made the choices by firstly discarding all the ones which were badly done, or had continuity errors or faults such as people in the shot or background noise we didn’t want, it was easy to find a good version of each shot as when we were filming we repeated each shot various times from various different angles or point of view, we chose the shots based on things such as; who we wanted to look in power or what we wanted to convey from the shot such as create tension or suspense which is a common convention of a thriller. We used editing techniques such as shot reverse shot at the door scene, and crosscutting when the mother is looking in the fridge and the policeman is looking through the drawers this created suspense for the audience as we could see what the policeman was doing but the mother couldn’t and this foreshadows he is not what he seems to the audience before the mother figures it out, we made sure we cut on the action such as the door scene which cuts from him closing one door to her opening another door, this graphic match looks good because we didn’t have to include them walking to another room, which saved filming time, and would’ve been quite boring. We found it quite difficult to find the right pace for our thriller but we sped up pace by cutting quickly on moments such as the key turning and the drawers opening to create suspense. I think we found the correct pace for ours as we don’t want it to quick as it isn’t high action but we don’t want it too slow either so we found the right balance between us this would appeal to an older audience who might like other slow paced films such as Dirty Pretty Things. To create perspective and show the binary opposition between the policeman and the woman, we used high angle shots on the policeman and gave him the majority of the camera time particularly at key moments such as him taking the phone or locking the door to show his character and to give him more power in the scene, especially at the end we focused more on him as he walks towards her to show him gaining all the power this also creates an enigma that needs to be solved by watching the rest of the film the audience are left guessing to see if she regains power or doesnt.
I found adding sound the hardest bit because we had to make sure that the dialogue was heard as well as adding suspense music, we went along to every voice clip and made sure they were equal in right and left ear, then balanced them by deleting the one that wasn’t as good and copying it and then panning it so we had the same sound for right and left ear. After this we found a suitable soundtrack for our thriller but we didn’t want it playing throughout so we cut it so it played in sections throughout, we didn’t add in any action noises as we managed to gain these when filming we added a slight low explosion noise to fill the silences and when turned down low it creates tension without covering the dialogue completely. We had a minor or a major key sound at significant moments to highlight them to the audience and to build up tension before the climax at the end this is a common convention of a thriller. I found the editing process quite challenging when it got to the sounds but I found it got easier as we went on, putting the shots together and cutting was simple and final cut pro was easy to use, if I were to do it again I would perhaps change the way we cut some of the shots and put them together as we did a lot of individual work which made it quite hard to come back to, so we ended up creating to versions in order to let everyone have a go at the beginning stage, I really enjoyed editing my favourite part was cutting all the beginning shots and coming up with a basic outline at the beginning because it gave us a basis to work from, it was also fun adding sound because we got to see it all come together and our idea was finally all put together. Our team worked really well together and we all knew how to edit but specialised at different bits I mainly did most of the video editing doing the cuts and the shot reverse shots and cross cutting, then others did more of the sound and pace side of it but we all got involved in every aspect we all gave ideas and tried different things until we all agreed to make sure our thriller reflected what we all wanted. The difference between editing our thriller and editing our preliminary task is that there was much more to do, we didn’t have sound on our preliminary task and we didn’t worry as much about pace and techniques, such as cross cutting also we didn’t have to add titles to our preliminary and we learnt about new tools such as markers, and rendering which didn’t occur when doing our preliminary. During this experience I think I have overcome a lot in terms of editing, before I knew nothing about final cut pro and had no idea how to cut in the right places in order to keep continuity we were able to use sounds and techniques in order to show our idea and convey the convention of a thriller and appeal to our target audience therefore making our thriller a success.