Editing Our Film

When our group began editing our film we were happy to have finished all of our filming. With all the shots together, we were excited to get started and begin to put all the clips together.
Firstly, after uploading our clips onto iMovie on our macs, we watched through all the clips and picked out the best shots for each scene. We had about 3 to 4 clips for each shot to pick from so we had a variety of really good taken shots and ones not so good. We called these our outtakes. They could include us laughing or somthing going wrong such as the script being wrong or entering the shot at the wrong time etc.
After collecting together all the best shots we placed them onto the timeline so the structure of the film was laid out. This is where our storyboard came in handy. We put each shot in order as what it said on the story board. We had to trim each shot down to cut out the clapper board and any unwanted footage. This didn't take too long as each shot didn't have to be trimmed too much. After this was complete it then gave our group an idea of what our finished film would look like.
Once the structure of the film was in place we then looked for sounds needed for certain parts of the film. For example the opening sequence of the path to the office, the seductive scene and the ending which would officially be the entrance to the rest of the RomCom film. We decided to go for three different music styles for each scene. The opening we went for a simple, calm piece of music to get the story into the flow of the RomCom. It also fitted nicely with the voice over of the email sent to Auntie Babs by her biggest fan 'Lucy'. The seductive scene was given a jungle that sounded a bit sexy. This was to show that Babs had that one her mind while she was daydreaming about Paolo. It also fitted well with what the characters were doing in the scene. Lastly we picked a rocky piece of music for the ending of our film becuase in our research of RomComs we noticed that at the beginning of films they include a good up beat tune to get the story rolling, and putting the characters in a certain light with their entrance.
Other sounds that we included in our films were sound effects such as the record scratching sound when Jen's daydreaming is cut. We thought this was appropriate for our film because RomComs need a bit of comedy and we felt this was a good way of showing some. Also, our voice overs of Jen were added to show the audience what she is thinking and showing that her conscience is a big part of who she is and can be very controlling. Also, in our research we noticed that most of them inlcluded some sort of voice over so we knew we needed to have it in our film somewhere. During putting the sounds in our shots, for some, we needed to make sure that the clip was muted so only the sound entered could be heard and nothing else in the clip. For example rustling in the set or a car going past in the street etc.
After the sounds were included we needed to produce our transitions between shots. These included fade through blacks and fade through whites. The fade through blacks were used for the beginning of the film and also at the end, to show the change in location. This was also a good oppotunity to insert our title of the film, this was so the audience could only take notice of the title and nothing else on screen. The fade through white was used to show the audience that Jen's sudection scene was just a dream and not real. When putting in the transitions, we also put in the credits. We placed the actors names over the clip at the beginning when making the way to the office. We decided to do this because it the RomComs we researched seemed to fade in their credits at the beginning to show that they weren't a distraction to the actual movie. We also included the production name in these credits too. We decided to use the same font as the title of the movie and the same colours. This was because we wanted it all to seem the same theme as RomComs have their own colour scheme throughout the movie, from the titles to the credits at the end and we wanted to do the same. We chose pink and black as it seemed to come across as a girly film so pink was a must.
After adding the correct shots, the transitions, the sounds and the credits we were nearing the end of our editing. The only thing left was to edit one shot to make it look blurry. This was the shot where Jen had lost her glasses by throwing them out of the window so she couldn't see hardly anything without them. We edited this shot by going onto the old iMovie and blurring the shot so it seemed like a point of view shot of the character. Once this was entered into our final piece we were complete.
However, we noticed that our film was well over two minutes, so our next step was to cut certain shots to get it down to two mintues. This was a very difficult stage for us because we liked all of our shots in the film and didn't know what ones to take out without making the film look too confusing and taking away the concept of the scene. In the end we decided to cut shots that were not really needed, for example some of Jen's replying shots and some of her shots that needed voice overs over the top. We then had our main task and a longer version which we called the Directors Cut.
Overall I enjoyed our editing because all of our hard work over a few months had created a great piece of footage for a RomCom film that in our groups eyes could become very successful in the real film world.