Edit Diary - Day 4

Today we started to focus on our titles.
After making a couple more small cuts making things more snappy we added in our titles. We are using a shot of a lamp which has been painted over so it says 'End Of The Line'. We played around with the titles to get them how we wanted them. First we had some very old-style computer font then a larger company name. When we looked over this we decided it would be better to stick to the same font and we all agreed it looked much better.
We made a start on sorting out our time lapse video. We chopped the whole 60 minutes into small chunks and as suggested deleted every 3rd slice. When we looked over this we were not very happy. It was also suggested that we did a cross dissolve of 3 different shades of light but as a group we aren't sure whether it will look good. If need be, we will take the time to cut the footage down to a little as we need.
We also reviewed our music track, it was slightly modified by Jesse. Flanna and I gave feedback on what we would like to change or hear more of. Hopefully we can finish a final cut early in the year so we can get the music in sync with the visual.

Edit Diary - Day 3

Today we continued to edit our opening, we sorted out the beginning so it is more snappy and now it looks better.
We found out half way through the lesson that our clip was to be no longer than 2 minutes, this caused a problem for us as our opening was past 2 minutes before it was finished. We managed to cut it down, it was easy as we could chop small part off lots of clips - the small changes made the big difference.
We may have found a solution to our time lapse problem. The whole thing is 1 hour long, so the computer is trying to read an hours worth of footage in 18 seconds, this is why we crashed every time. We had to make the decision to make the footage shorter anyway as we were over the 2 minute mark so we cut down to where the footage is quite dark. We will be using about 30 minutes of footage instead. If we chop this 30 minutes in lots of small parts, 2 minutes each for instance, the computer should be able to cope with the footage. Unfortunately the process of cutting the footage will be a long and laborious one, but overall I think it is worth it so our thriller looks as good as it can be.
We also had a first taster of the music, and the group agreed that it fits well. It will create a real tense atmosphere when you are watching. We won't be using a convention soundtrack, strings and low rumbling, but a dub soundtrack.
A problem we encountered this day was that our computer crashed near the beginning of the lesson. All our initial cuts were lost, this did not take long to rectify but it was annoying and put us back 10 minutes.

Music

Just a rough track for our thriller that i wrote! forget about the part after 2 minute as it is wrong!

Edit Diary - Day 2

In our second edit day we managed to finish a rough first cut! As a group we were all very proud of our outcome and we could already tell that it was going to look good. 

We decided that the street scene needs to be a bit more snappy. We also need to find somewhere to insert our title shot. Unfortunately we did not sort out our london eye footage, we were more concerned with looking at the general outline of our piece. We can keep going back over and over but I think we need something to look at first to keep interested and on task.

We realised that we could have done with a lot more location shots, to establish the scene. We can get by with what we have but we felt that if we had invested more time in taking beautiful shot, we could have had an excellent opener.

Edit Diary - Day 1

On tuesday we started our edit. We soon realised that the whole process would be a long and hard process.

We mainly stuck to our storyboard, but we added some things in where we felt that something did not work or looked bad. I couldn't imagine going into an edit without a storyboard now, it really is vital.

We were really happy with the quick cut parts of our opening. It looks stylish and as we intended. The walking down the street scene started to look good too.

We ran into problems with our london eye footage. The hour was condensed to just 30 seconds so it had to be rendered. Still after it was rendered we still faced problems, we need to look at how we can fix this in the next edit.

We started to think about music, Jesse and I had a quick look through the samples and soundtracks available for us to use. We are still discussing whether or not we should compose something.

We managed to make the first 2 minutes or so. Our main priority at the moment is to get a rough outline of our opening, once that is done we can keep refining it until it is near enough to perfect.

Reviewing the footage

Today we looked at our footage we collected over the previous week. As a group we were happy with most of the footage we shot. But, as with everything, somethings disappointed us.

Some of the footage we shot on location was quite shaky. We could have used the tripod to make it look better. However, we do have footage which demonstrates we can use a camera and keep it stable so the shaky camerawork will look like a style choice, as we originally intended it to do so.

Another problem was when I was shooting at the London Eye. As I said in a previous post, I was worried that the camera was jogged slightly when I showed the Police officers what I was filming. When reviewing the footage, looking at the first shot and the final shot I can see that there is not a visible difference and it shouldn't be noticed when it is sped up.

Finally, I realised that that an exposition shot was not taken, we forgot to plan it in our shot list. Although it is just one shot it is quite a vital part of continuity editing. However, I think we will have enough footage to sort something out.

Now all the footage is up on the computers we are ready to start the edit. Before we start however, we need to draw out a final storyboard. We had a rough one accompanying our shot list but we feel that a good storyboard will make the editing process much easier.

My Filming Experiences

When filming our thriller, i did most of the camera work. this is because both flanna and josh were both acting. i enjoyed this as working with camera's is something i think i'm good at. 

film days

On the two main days of filming my experience was good on the first day we used the meeting room as josh was the main character he tended to shoot less shots it was enjoyable but stressful as we had to remember continuity the main object was the clock as the time is significant to the story i had to keep setting the clock back it was frustrating but worth it we set up the room apropriatlyand kept tight to our storyboard there were a few things we have to tweek and we made a real effort setting up the room so it looked as authentic as possible because the clock was an important factor we had to keep resetting it, by shooting this i realised how much detail there has to be with certain objects.