Editing

We reviewed and selected shots so that we could label them, so we would be able to have an idea of what was in the shot so that we could speed up the editing process by having a brief summary of what was in the shot and what type of shot it was, for example, ‘agitated girl (mid shot)’. The group made the decision to label the shots while they were in the rushes folder so that our timeline wasn’t too clogged up. The timeline gives a brief preview of the clip duration, it is also the place where the editor will adjust clip duration and order of shots. The framing  of the shots had to be good otherwise it was not used as it would look too amateur and we wanted our opening sequence to look professional so that we could gain interest of the audience.

The shots would need to be cropped so that we could cut into other shots or if there was any extraneous dialogue or audio that we didn’t want in the thriller. The blade tool was used so that we could quickly crop a shot in the timeline, the razor is useful to break a shot into two sections, so that you can move one section later or delete one section as a whole. Shot composition was influenced by the cropped shots as depending on the actors response to the dialogue in the scene, so when the male lead says ‘there is a lot of people around you’ we cut to a wide shot to show the people surrounding her, whereas when the girl says ‘we leapt and we landed in the fresh fallen snow’ quietly, we go to a close up as it is a mental not to herself. We edited the clips together so that the dialogue would make sense, sometimes composition had to be sacrificed as the story would have not made sense if we used the audio from one of the other shots.

We used the timeline to order the shots and adjust the timing so that we would only have speech from the actors and not from anyone on set, this provided continuity as the people in our group are not actors in the thriller, therefore it would not make sense for them to have audio in the sequence. We stuck to one layer in the timeline as we didn’t have a script for our thriller so the clips didn’t all have the same dialogue, therefore we didn’t need to have multiple layers as the times the actors would say things would be different from clip to clip.

We had sound from the microphone on set, this was diegetic as it was happening within the scene.

We matched action in the thriller by cutting usually when there is movement and then matched them up to when there is a similar movement in another clip, therefore as there is movement, it is harder to see if there is a slight delay in the action. We used a shot reverse shot to show dialogue in the scene, so if one actor was saying something, the camera would be on them and then we would usually cut to the other actor when they replied however, sometimes we had reaction shots where we held the shot on the actor that isn’t saying anything also that we could get their reaction to what the other actor is saying. We created diegesis in the opening thriller through dialogue, so we would get the actors to answer each others questions with the question so that the audience would be able to see that it was a response.

We used relatively fast paced cuts and didn’t hold on a single shot for longer than we had to. Fast paced cuts are a convention of there thriller genre as it speeds up the pace of the opening sequence.