Editing

We began editing our piece and already had an understanding of Final Cut Pro from the pre-lim task. In the first two lessons of editing, we managed to log and capture everything get the first scene roughly put together. As we had so many shots it was difficult to log and capture, as we had some shots that were about a second long and it took us a while to get used to it and all of our shots.

We then watched all of our shots to see if we had everything we needed and then discussed them and colour coded our shots so it would be easier to tell which one was our best shot when putting it all together. We began to mark in and mark out our shots from the first scene and put them together quite quickly. We experimented with the order of our shots to see what worked most effectively. We all contributed our opinions equally and even though we sometimes had different opinions, we listened to each others' ideas and made decisions together. We then had a click around and found the cross dissolve effect, which we ended up using quite a lot in our opening.

We began to create the sound but decided it would be much easier when we finish the editing as we can export the video to Soundtrack Pro so everything fits. We did however, spend some time writing down some sounds/music that we liked and could be suitable for our thriller (drone machine, clock, force field, ambient sound, camera sound, typing sound). We then began to edit our email scene, taking away the shot where you can see the woman's feet walking because it was less effective. 



She shot of the camera was a bit bright so we tried to adjust the colour but it still looked too bright and was orange. Soon, we managed to get to the end of our opening without editing the shots much. We got feedback from our teacher and she said that the pace was a bit slow so we cut some shots and sped some up. We then put our clocks in and sped them up too. We could hear ourselves talking in some shots where there is meant to be no dialogue and will sort this out before making the soundtrack. 



We liked how our beginning was quite slow because it built up tension but we decided that the walking shots should be a lot quicker to contrast with it. We made the clock shots shorter and took away the shot of Jack in the phone booth as it didn't fit very well with everything. We also took away our final shot, where the woman 2 snatches the picture and walks away because we thought it would be more effective to end on her line "You know exactly what I want...". We then made a rough cut of our thriller, which was exactly 3 minutes, to evaluate and make appropriate changes.

Rough cut:

Thriller Rough Cut from BDC on Vimeo.

At this stage in our editing we made a rough cut of our opening, which we managed to get to the end of it what we wanted. Obviously we need to add music and titles. We made a list of everything we needed to do from here:

- Fix over exposed shots (1:04, 1:32, 2:48)

- Speed up shot that pans from the computer screen to woman 2's face. (0:38)

- Make some shots look more "gritty" as some give too much verisimilitude.

- Add titles.

- Add music using Soundtrack Pro.

- Fix audio where you can hear us behind the camera and dip louder sounds like the van going past.

- Make the picture taking more obvious as it is very important. Maybe put the still image of the photo in there.

-Decide on what to call our Thriller.

We looked at experimenting with colours and managed to fix our overexposed shots, although they still looked quite bright, that was the best we could do without them looking too orange.

We then managed to layer a black and white shot over our shot which we mixed to make our inside shots more appealing as the scene with in the classroom looked too cheerful with yellow walls and sunlight pouring in, so we used this effect for a more threatening mood. We also decided to add this to most of our brighter outside shots as well as it made our shots more consistent. 

We used the razor tool to split she shot where woman 2 smiles so that we could speed up the beginning of it and keep the rest the same. Then, we shortened some more shots for a more speedy pace.

We began to add titles and had some trouble with picking an appropriate font as we wanted something plain but not too boring. We decided on a sans serif font at first, which I thought looked a bit too plain and curvy for a thriller film, but we wrote all our titles, placing them randomly so we can sort them out next lesson.

Titles (in order):

An AAC production

In association with LOCK Studios

Jack Smart

Hannah Mellows

Sophie Banks

Title of our thriller

We spend the rest of the lesson thinking about what to call our thriller. We looked in a thesaurus for words that mean unseen but didn't find anything that we really liked. We then decided to relate our title to the most important thing in our opening - the photograph. We thought SNAPSHOT had a good ring to it.

Final edited title

When creating our titles we couldn't find an effective font our the title of our film and didn't have enough time to go through every font. Therefore, I went through every font on my computer at home and picked out a few of my favourites. I made all of the titles bold and in capital letters so that it would stand out. I then e-mailed Sophie and Jack the image below and they helped to make a final decision on the font, which I edited to make it look more interesting.

Options for a title

I then used the photo taken from the shoot (the one passed across the table in the cafe scene) to make the picture taking scene more significant. I added lines around the outside of the picture to create corners and a cross in the middle to mark the centre. This was to make it look like a camera screen - a point of view shot from the camera as a still image. We imported both of our images into our edit and saw a large improvement in our work.

We then fixed the sound in some of our shots as you could hear us talking behind the camera, a van driving past and mobile phone signal sounds. We dipped the sound for some of these things but for others we copy and pasted sound from our other shots that fitted well. We made sure that we were happy with everything in our thriller and made necessary changes before creating the soundtrack because we knew that we wouldn't be able to change things (timing-wise) after we put the sound in.


We imported our video into SoundtrackPro so we could fit our soundtrack in with what was going on visually and our natural diegetic sounds. We had experimented with lots of sounds previously and had written the names of them down. So we put those together. The ticking clock sound was our main sound as it ran through the whole opening. We added some sounds over the top and built the volume one was a force field sound and one was a drone machine. We added an explosion sound effect when our title shows to give it more emphasis and to make the audience jump. We then chose our music for the walking scenes. Luckily, we found the perfect music instantly and it built up really effectively and worked with all of our shots. We learnt how to control the volume of our sounds and fade them in and out. 


We then imported the finished soundtrack into our edit and watched it through. The sound had made it so much more effective as the sounds really gave an 'on the edge' atmosphere and the music built a lot of tension. We used the razor blade tool to separate the Snapshot title to create a flashing effect so it looked like a flash of a camera and worked well with the explosion sound effect. We then made sure that this didn't change the length of our thriller as that would change how the music built.