Editing within Our Final Production

Editing was by far the most demanding part of our Final Production, yet we were also suprised with how efficiently it ensued. We had a minor setback in that the first days editing was lost, due to data corruption, but after that, the editing went smoothly, and it was not long before we saw the fruits of our labour becoming what we had initally envisioned. We spent several days lessons time, in addition to several days after school getting the film in the correct order, and the first task was to make sure that, out of the nine minutes of footage we initially had, we could pinpoint the two minutes worth of clips which we needed to meet the brief.

We had such an enormous amount of footage due to numerous shots of each scene, so that we could decide which worked best together and use them. However, editing it down did not take as long as we thought, and I'd estimate that it took about an hour to get all of the clips in order. The first day of editing was mainly focused on deciding which clips to keep and which to discard, and afterwards we believe we selected the best shots that we could have chosen.

The next task was to cut the clips down; we still had four minutes of footage within our clips, and it was quite a difficult task to cut them down, and decide which bits were needed and which were not. We hadn't predicted how short of a period of time two minutes was during filming, and meeting the brief proved to be quite a task in itself. However, we eventually managed to reduce our film to just under two minutes (1:51), and this allowed us to add the titles and credits, and to change any scenes which we needed to at the time.

The last task was to add sound to the production, which me and John handled ourselves after school. The main soundtrack was the one featured on the previous page of my blog, which I made using www.freesoundproject.com, and the additional sound effects came from the Mac computers as copyright-free material - mainly the thuds and suspense-driven music which overlays the title track. After the sound was added, it was the simple task to look over everything and to see which parts needed changing and any extra effects which we needed to add, before Our Final Production would be completed.