Editing

1/2/2011 : My job within the pair was to edit and so i started doing this at the beginning of february. At first i was slightly cautious as i had only used the software in the preliminary and hadn't really realised what more advanced options i could use for the actual film opening. I started off at first importing the clips into Premier Pro and putting them in the correct format and then i went looked through the many clips that Jess had filmed. To make sure we got the perfect shot Jess had filmed each clip several times and so I had to watch through each clip to choose which was the best quality, angle and best for how we wanted to show our film. Once i had done this the whole film had been cut down to only about 30 seconds long and so I told Jess that more filming would be needed. After this I then started to cut down the clips so that they would continously flowed together as some of them had laughing in, talking that wasn't meant to be there or a delay until the actors realised they were recording. To do this i would double click on the clip so that the clip i wanted to cut down came up in a seperate box in the upper left hand corner and i would then be able to see the clip more clearly and slower to make sure that i could choose where i wanted to cut it down perfectly. I did this with all the clips from the first lot of filming. Then we needed to add the candinate details, production company etc in so I clicked "New Title" and another box would come up where i could write, change the font and colour and size of the text onto a background and then when i had chosen what i wanted i would just have to click off and then drag down the title from the clips box and slot it into where it was needed. I then chose to add a dissolve effect from the effects box onto the slide as I thought it was too harsh and jolty from one clip. To do this you simply dragged the dissolve desired onto the title and then increased or decreased the length of it by selecting it and dragging the arrow either left or right.

18/2/2011 : Today was my second block of editing. Within this week i did a lot of the same kind of things as last week, there was plenty of watching clips and cutting out what was not needed and adding a few more titles however with this week I decided to add the music on. Me and Jess had chosen a piece of music that was not copyrighted so suitable to use and we decided to have it running throughout the whole film so to do this i simply imported the music and then dragged it down into where the film was and then extended it to as long as i needed it by moving the arrow at the end of the clip to the right. However I hit a problem as i was editing our first bit of speech in as the speech was too quite to have the music playing at the volume it was behind it but i learnt to be able to change that. To do this i clicked on the sound clip and the horizontal yellow line that goes through the entire clip and dragged it downwards. This then turned the musics volume down but still let it be heard. I did the same to the speech clips but dragged the line up to increase the volume. This resulted in a great success and the speech was able to be heard. There was also a mistake within the filming as Jess had shot the last chunk of filming in a different light to this second chunk so I decided to turn the contrast and brightness down on the clips from this week and then to slightly distract the viewers of the film I added another title in from last weeks filming to this weeks. I then finished off cutting down the clips and added the dissolve effect to this slide too but realised again that we would need about another 40 seconds of filming to go and so would have to wait for the week after to finish.

10/3/2011 : This was the final week of editing and the quickest. I simply looked through the last bits of footage and got rid of the ones not needed then cut down the ones i wanted to so that they flowed well into each other. In the end we actually ended up having too much footage and had to cut down or get rid of certain clips that possibley weren't as good as others to keep within the 2 minute limit. I had to add another lot of music onto the end as the clip wasn't long enough so i just copied the first clip I had used but other then that everything went well and smoothly.

Conclusion : I'm pleased with my editing, i could have possibley been more efficent and at times managed my time better but it was hard to always know when filming could be done and when editing could be done. One problem i encountered was the lack of computers at time and having to wait a lesson to use one. If i ever did this again i would possibley try book computers in advance to manage time more efficiently but i think that overall I accomplished what little problems I had and managed to learn new skills on Premier Pro and put together a good first 2 minutes to a film.