Editing Process

Here is a post devoted entirely to the editing process our group went through when bringing the finishing touches to our footage all in order to create a final cut of 'Dead Man Running'.

Each section deals with various processes we went through to bring out the best quality of our film.

We used Mac computers and the film editing program, Final Cut Express. We have had previous experience with this computer program from last year, creating our Horror Film, 'Killer Heels' and our music video for Lana Del Rey's, 'Born To Die'. As our whole group has had experience with this program in the past, we all felt confident while editing and felt we were experienced enough now to improve and create our best quality work to date.

Along the journey we came across various problems and obsticals which we tried our best to overcome and produce our final film.

The Opening Credits:-



Colour Scheme:-

Using the Colour Balance tool on Final Cut Express, we were able to change the colour balance and Hue of the footage, manually altering the saturation to black and white and increasing the black and white contrast to give stark definition to the dark and light areas. This allowed a previously greyscale film to now appear artistic and follows the style of Film Noir.

Screen Shots:-

As we are all fairly experienced in using this programme, we were able to upload, render, cut down to desired size and order all of our clips easily without any confusion. Looking loosely at our initial storyBoard and Stage Directions on our script we were easily able to identify/classify the selected clips into the right order on the timeline.

Problems and Solutions:-

We came across a few problems when editing our movie, one of which appearing in the newspaper scene.

In this scene the Femme Fatale picks up a newspaper and comes across an article of a murder. We were initially planning to create a fake newspaper article and take a close up photo of it - inserting it into the film. However it was nearly impossible to get the newspaper to look authentic, as well as the image standing out like a sore thumb between the video clips. I then had the idea that instead of showing a close up of the newspaper, we could show a close up of the Femme Fatale's facial expression instead. Along with this we could include a voice over clip (recorded on an Iphone) of the Femme Fatale's thoughts being expressed to the viewer. That way we could get the message across to the audience and avoid confusion without having to show the newspaper closely.

 

I like the final shot and the voice over as it gives the audience an insight into the thoughts of the character

 

Sound:-

We wanted to use some classic Jazz sounds in the backdrop for specific parts of our film. We felt that this would fit the iconic noir feel and the music may create the desired atmosphere's we were looking to create. Below i have created 2 video's in which the music tracks are playing along to screen shots of the chosen scenes. The music along with the images allows an atmosphere to be created - giving a dramatic effect.

Conclusion:-

Overall, our Editing Process went very smoothly and we did not come across many problems along the way. I feel the initial practise task of creating a music video previously, as well as spending alot of time editing our Horror Film last year has worked in our favour. By practising and spending more frequent hours on this programme, as well as being shown various tutorials in the past, we were all able to put our experience together and create our invisioned plan almost identically to what we had previously planned.