EDITING TIME! Entry One

Monday

Monday morning bright fresh and ready to rock and roll with a huge virtual mountain of video captures sitting ready on the hard drive for myself (Editor) and James (Director) to spend pretty much all Monday morning choosing the cream of the crop, disposing unneeded captures and renaming files for reference to aid the editing workflow.

So in more detail regarding the workflow for this first step, to start of we had two folders named “Day One” and “Day Two” these names were a temporary measure from the capturing session after each days shoot hence the file names referring to the day of the shoot

From square one the first process in the workflow was to organise these folders into scenes. The most logical way to approach this was to look through the clips individually with the script in hand as a reference, and one by one assess the video clips against duplicate takes. We did this by opening each clip in finder and comparing it to other takes from the same camera angle. To make a successful choice at this stage, we looked for obvious continuity problems within the clip that would never be considered for the final cut, aspects like crew members appearing, boom microphones making an unwanted appearance and other problems of that nature. After such assessments were made, we would then remove what was not needed and drop the successful clips into there corresponding scene folders.

After that very long process, but most enjoyable at times (especially the bloopers ha-ha) it was time to set up a project folder in Apples Final Cut. Since all the files were organised and ready to go this made the process of setting it up with the scratch disks a breeze.

That was it the hard part over, or so it seemed, this opinion was soon to be changed! But that’s a story for later in the journal entry. In the afternoon I made a decision to slice and dice together the intro sequence, made up of arty farty slow motion clips. The clips look amazing alone! But when there edited together! The sequence was in a league of its own.

The idea of the sequence was to establish the visual appearance and attitude of the main location. Revealing a gambling, cheating, sleazy attitude with the contrast of a rich classy looking location where all this filth takes place. Without giving too much away, it’s a great little sequence and I am very happy with the outcome.

Problems and Solutions:

The only real problem was warming to the software again after a long time of not using Final Cut. Solved this problem by taking time on editing the intro sequence with no pressure.