Editing

For editing we used a timeline based editing software which is called Adobe Premiere Pro CC (which is a part of the Adobe Creative Cloud, which also includes softwares such as After Effects and Photoshop) which is a professional editing software which is widely used within the film industry. We learnt to use this software at the beginning of the year during our prelim task because the editing crew at our school taught us the basics of it, how to stay organised, use different tools etc.

This is how we used Adobe Premiere Pro CC to edit our AS Thriller: We began by creating a new “Project” on Premiere with the “General Settings” which include Renderer: Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration (Open CL), Video Display Format: Timecode, Audio Display Format: Audio Samples, Capture Format: DV. We then imported the footage we had shot on the camera, off the SD card and onto the computer we were working on and then imported it into the new “Project” which we had created. We placed the footage into a “folder/bin” on Premiere which we called “Rushes”, which was where we were going to keep our original footage in an untouched state so we could always go back to that folder to get the footage incase something went wrong with the footage on our timeline. We next began to start to watch all the footage we had filmed to refresh our memory and to sort which clips we thought were usable and we liked and which ones weren’t. When we selected all the footage which we wanted to use we dragged this footage into a bin which we called “Rough Cut 1”. We were advised to not edit in chronological order but rather to edit little sections of our opening sequence and then at the end adding them all together, so we decided to start by editing the fight scene, so we dragged all our fight footage onto our “timeline” and started to rearrange the footage into an order which we thought looked good.

Whilst we were looking at our footage on our timeline, one “Key Board” short cut which we used quite a bit was pressing “cmd + shift + 1” which allowed us to zoom in on the timeline and “cmd + —“ to zoom out on our timeline. doing this allowed us to not get lost on our timeline and see where everything is located or zoom in precisely on a certain clip to be more precise. During the entire editing process another Key Board Shortcut which we often used was “cmd + S” which allowed us to save our work (which we were saving onto the desktop of our computer, so we could access the “ALIAS” easily instead of having to go searching through a bunch of folders for the file we needed). When we were organising our footage on our timeline into the order which we wanted it, we would use the Key Board Shortcut “v” to use the selection tool to select and move around the piece of footage.

Once we had all our footage in the order which we wanted it to go in we were ready to start connecting pieces of footage without big gaps between them, so we used the Razor Tool which has the Key Board Shortcut “C” to start to trim our footage so that we would have only the part of the clip which we liked and needed and not all the rest. In our thriller we used mainly “jump cuts” so once we had tried the clip to the length which we needed it we pressed “v” for the selection tool and simply dragged it right next to clip which goes before it. To help stay organised, we placed every other clip on the  second footage column and the same with the audio clip which accompanies that footage clip, so that we had one piece of footage down, then one up, then one down etc. so that it was clear where each cut was and where each piece of footage was located. When the cuts between each clip was not a jump cut it was either a “fade from black” or a “fade to black”, we did this by selecting the clip we wanted to fade out/in and then going into “effects controls” and from there we either lowered or increased the “opacity” of the clip from one part of the clip to the other to make the clip either fade in or out.

Once we had cut all our footage together into a sequence we were happy with, we began to start editing the audio which went along with the footage, this was important, because for example in certain clips, the sound of a vacuum cleaner could be heard in the background. Each clip had to spend clips, one from the standard low quality microphone on the camera and another sound clip which came from the “Boom microphone” which were using which ended up recording a lot better sounding sound then the microphone on the camera, so we decided to delete all the sound which came from the microphone on the camera and only use the sound from the “Boom Microphone”. We turned up and down the volume of the sound clips by dragging up and down the volume level of the sound clip, on the time line, sometimes we even had to turn the volume of the diegetic sound clips completely down and had to replace it with more realistic Sound Effects “SFX”. We did this on parts of our opening sequence such as the scene where the intruder screws the silencer onto the gun or when our protagonist hits the intruder in the head with a glass bottle, the original audio on these clips were of bad quality and hard to hear, so we found some “royalty free” sound effects of a silencer being screwed onto a gun and the sound of glass breaking and we placed these sound effects where the original sound of the silencer being screwed on/ glass being broken was.

Though most of our editing process went pretty well and we learnt a lot more from the time we filmed our Prelim Task we still had a few issues, for example one day when we were editing, the school had a power shortage and all the electronics in the school editing suite turned off without saving the progress which we had done since the last time we had pressed “cmd + S” to save our project. We ended up loosing quite a bit of work due to the power shortage but it ought us the lesson to save our work more frequently.