One Big Massive Editing Post

I thought it would be easier if I wrote one post on editing but would come back to it each time we did something new as it's easier to read in one bit instead of going through my other posts to look for it.

(1) We've filmed our introduction and put into iMovie which is the program we're using! So far, we've got the introduction and a little bit after that which is the character and the conscience walking out of our setting of the churchyard. We edited it all together and it comes to a total of 1:36 which is more than we expected!

However, when we showed it to our teacher, she pointed out to us that some of our shots were too long and it didn't cut to the beat. She said 'It looks like you've made a film and just put music over the top'. This was such good feedback for us because we then realised what we should actually be doing and we were able to change it as we hadn't filmed much. So now, I'm going to make sure everything is cut to the beat and we're going to be so meticulous about it!


(2) We've finished filming most of the narrative but can't edit it until we've filmed our band footage but that's not for another two weeks! Here's a Facebook print screen of the event that was created for it:

Print screen

The gig is in half term so we'll need to 'hire' out two cameras and a tripod from our teacher and we're borrowing an HD camera from a friend and I also have a tripod so we'll have three angles to film from which will have a variety of shots! We've decided to have two cameras on a tripod; one on each side of the stage and one person holding a camera moving in and out of the crowd getting different shots of the band from long distance, medium long distance, medium close up distance and close up distance.


(3) We've filmed the band so technically everything is filmed now but there's been an issue with two of the cameras. Whilst filming, we think that maybe we were too close to the speakers and they switched themselves off. However they would turn back on so everything was fine! But not a lot of footage got filmed because of this so we decided to film more than our chosen song as we would have extra footage just in case we needed it.

Although we decided to change the song from Frozen to Faith because of time issues, we still weren't 100% sure of the change so we decided we would film the band playing Frozen just in case we changed it back again. Unfortunately they didn't play Frozen so looks like our mind is made up about which song to use!


(4) We're having some trouble getting the footage off the cameras and into iMovie. When we connect the camera via USB cable, the computer recognises the camera but iMovie doesn't for some reason which is odd. However we're getting some IT help so hopefully we should be able to start the rest of the editing!


(5) Finally after encoding, formatting and other technical things we've managed to get our band footage onto the the Apple Mac we've been using and into iMovie! This is great because it means we can finally sort out where to put band footage and how to split up the narrative and performance. So far we have put all our narrative footage into order in iMovie so now we need to decide where our and footage goes.


(6) We've started to put the band footage in and we didn't realise how time consuming it would be. For example lip syncing. It's time consuming because when putting in the footage, we need to sync the lyrics to the lead singer singing them. This sounds simple but actually it's not. It took us a while to get each clip to match with the sound but after a while we adjusted to it and started to make better judgements about where to cut it!


(7) At the end of our footage we decided to put the opening sequence in reverse at the end. We've done this to symbolise the fact that it's a full circle. For example after he's killed the masked man, the character unmasks him and realises it's him. Therefore he's essentially killed himself as it's his conscience so we thought this would tie in the whole back to the beginning/circular symbolisation.

Before

(8) We borrowed two cameras from college and another from a friend. Because all three were from different places, the quality was different. This meant that the two college cameras were lower quality than our friend's camera because it was HD. This proved a problem because all three cameras picked up the light differently at the gig and so some footage is really light and some is really dark. Unfortunately because the gig wasn't a controlled environment we couldn't make the lighting to our choice so we had to like it or lump it. But the thing we kept telling ourselves was that we weren't professional directors with a multimillion pound budget for our music video, we're students whose budget was £16! (The mask was £1 and entry to the gig was £5 each). So we felt better about this!

After

Because of the difference in light, we played around with the contrast and brightness levels in the footage. However, the footage began to be incredibly grainy and pixelated so we thought about putting it into black and white. We did this and although both cameras' footage isn't exactly the same quality or residue, we think it's made it looks better than before so we're leaving it in black and white!