Editing Diaries

Editing Diary 1 

After our first session of editing, we managed to import all of our footage from filming into the iMovie programme. We had already been through most of the clips and selected the best ones to put into the final product, but we still had a few that we couldn't decide between until we put them into the rest of the sequence. Once we had ordered the clips they came to about 4 minutes long, and so we knew that it was going to be a difficult job to edit down, even after cutting out all of the unnecessary bits from the beginning and end of each clip. 
During our next session, we will need to start shortening these clips and make the last couple of decisions on which are the best pieces of footage to use. 


Editing Diary 2

Coming back to the film today we could see that there were some clips which didn't fit in where they had been placed. This has meant that we needed to do some reshuffling with the clips so that they made sense in the narrative. We started cutting out the parts of the shots which were too long or weren't needed in the sequence and this has taken ages and ages to do because we had to somehow get it down to about 2 minutes. This took a few sessions to do, and finally we got it down to 2 minutes and 11 seconds. I have written on the blog post under Edit 1 what the feedback from out teachers was and that has given us a starting point for the next session.

Editing Diary 3 

Today we tried putting music the chosen music in to our sequence. It took a little while to work out how to get the music to go onto iMovie because the music file type wasn't compatible and so we had to use a programme called Clip Converter to make the file an MP3 to go into iMovie. After adding this in, we decided that actually the music was a bit to festive and christmassy for an opening sequence that is actually quite saddening and is supposed to evoke empathy and sympathy from out audience, therefore we took the music out and tried looking for another choice of music. Annoyingly, before we thought about it we took the old music file out and put the new music file in before we saved a copy of it so w weren't able to put an edit of this on our blog. On top of this however, we have also decided that there are certain parts of the sequence, like the match on action scene with the candle being lit, that are too disjointed and need refilming, so we've decided to organise a date to refilm these parts.

Editing Diary 4

Since our last editing session a few days ago, none of us have been free on the same day so we haven't managed to refilm these parts yet  but there were lots of other things that needed to be edited this session. We made the titles for the actors, etc a bit longer because from our feedback from peers, no one had long enough to read them properly. So we did this, and also when trying to make digital typography for the more important titles such as director and producer, we realised that they looked out of place in the sequence and so in a way it was a good thing that we hadn't refilmed already because we then decided to do more ambient titles for these roles too.

Editing Diary 5

Over the holiday period we managed to schedule a time for re-filming where we re-did some footage and also came up with some more alternative and creative ways to display the end titles. In this session we have managed to replace all of the shots which weren't shot well enough originally, and also add in the titles at the end, and the institution titles at the beginning. The project finally started to look like it is coming together when we added in our new choice of music which is slower and more downbeat and so suits the atmosphere of our opening sequence a lot more. This version of our edit can be seen under Edit 2 under the construction header on the blog.

Editing Diary 6

When re-watching this edit with our teachers, they said that they felt that something was missing from the sequence to bring it all together, and that was something to frame the sequence and make it seem more like it was telling a story over the time given. On top of this, they said that the main title which we tried to do using online typography looked very strange in contrast to all of the other titles in the sequence, no matter where in the sequence it was placed. So to overcome this problem we decided to use the idea of a calendar to document time passing over the month and to outline the build up to her Christmas, and that we were going to gradually cross out days on the calendar all the way up to Christmas eve, where we would write the main title of our film. So in this session , we made a lot of important decisions for the sequence, and also did a bit more tweaking to try and make it look as smooth, tidy and professional as we could.

Editing Diary 7 

As the most convenient time for us to film soon was when we were all in school together, we used the school's photography studio to film the calendar aspect of our sequence. This took about an hour and I brought in some Christmas decorations to tie it in with the film. In our this editing session we put these clips into the film sequence to see what it looked like and it ended up looking quite good. However we did put all of them at the beginning of the sequence and then only two at the end and we felt that this looked a bit strange so we spread them out more equally about the sequence, which also made us realise that putting the title of the film at the end of it made  it look a bit too much like a trailer, so we decided to put it in just after the main actors at the beginning of the sequence. This complied to the conventions of films in that this is the usual order of titles, and so we felt that this looked the most professional.

Editing Diary 8

This was the final editing session we had and so Ella and I decided to go back and do the last few tweaks on the final product to neaten it up a bit more. This was really important for us as there was a blip in the end of the sequence where two of the files had been corrupted since the last session. So, to overcome this we took these two clips out of the sequence and edited them back in a few times until finally the file played correctly. This final edit can be seen on my blog under the Final Product header.