Editing our thriller.

The first thing we did was review our footage. After that, we reviewed all the rushes, this allowed us to see which clips were unusable, for example, if there were mistakes in any of the clips, such as the actress laughing and at one point we left the camera rolling and it was just filming black. Looking through the clips also highlighted the ones that we wanted to definitely use. Some of the shots that we thought were unusable were actually usable for some parts, so we therefore cut them into sections that we could use. We then kept these clips incase we had to use them later incase we couldn’t find a shot to match a certain action. We then created a new bin and of the rushes we were going to use and we then added the clips onto the timeline and put them in groups according to the camera angles. Next we re named them so we didn’t get confused as to what was what. We made sure that we kept saving our work after each step.

Editing the Clips

A lot of our shots had us talking to the actress and shouting ‘rolling’ and ‘action’ so we therefore had to cut these parts out, as we couldn’t use them. There were also some shots of our actress corpsing half way through a scene so we therefore had to cut them as well. We added all our clips to the timeline which helped us re arrange them and it made it a lot easier to see the shots and therefore made it easier picking which shot we wanted to use and where we wanted to put it. We cut the shots by using the razor tool. Once the shots were in the right order, we began to cut them even more to make them much shorter which overall, made the sequence a lot quicker, building more suspense and tension.

Sequence and order of the shots

To make sure we didn’t get confused or overlap our shots, we put them on different levels of the timeline, which made it easier. This also helped with continuity as we could closely edit the shots that we needed to match on action. By using the + and – buttons, we could zoom in and out which allowed us to get the exact moment we needed as we could zoom in and out as much as we wanted to. My group found it difficult when editing match on action and this is because there was a few continuity issues. All though I think we done a good job costume and make up wise, we needed to make sure the actress was doing the exact same actions and movements each time we filmed it and this is something we didn’t do, although it was roughly the same. However, it showed when editing and I think our match on action looks a little rough and jumpy.

Transitions and titles

We had an issue in the fact that our thriller wasn’t long enough so we decided that we would add titles at the start on a black screen and we would just hear the sound of the dirt hitting the top of the coffin. Originally, we wanted to layer the titles over the clips while it was slow paced and we were going to stop the titles become quicker, but it was way to short doing this, so we added it to a black screen and then thought of the idea of adding sound, which we liked. We then had another problem as we had a lot of titles, so it was a black screen for a long time before the opening sequence even started. This didn’t look good and it was also make the audience bored and they would lose concentration. We therefore decided to do half and half. We now have a few seconds of black where the titles come up then the opening sequence starts and the titles still come up. At the end of the opening sequence, we see her laying in the coffin and the camera zooms out and we can hear her breathing and then it cuts straight to black and the title ‘BENEATH’ appears. The music we heard at the start also fades in as the camera Is zooming out.