Story-telling | Production Notes: Editing

Once the shoot was complete, I was able to transfer the footage to my desktop for editing; I also backed up the footage to a hard drive and my laptop in case anything went wrong with the system, so our hard work would not go down the drain.  After organising the video files in Adobe Premiere, I was able to piece together a rough cut of my film.

The first thing I noticed was that there was a constant static noise in about half of my footage.  It remains unclear as to what the cause of this static was – likely a malfunctioning cable – but this highlighted the importance of having a dedicated sound engineer present, rather than having to juggle the roles between myself and Will, who was primarily behind the camera, whilst I was directing and acting as well.  This would have given us a better chance of noticing whether or not the audio was working correctly during filming.  This was a setback in the editing process, but not a complete disaster – I was able to isolate the static noise in some audio tracks, and remove it the unwanted sound.  Unfortunately, most of the audio was affected by this issue, including the ambient track we recorded.  Therefore, I have had to rerecord the vast majority of my audio, and dub it over what we had initially recorded, which was a very dull and laborious task, but it was the best chance I had without reshooting, which I simply did not have the time or resources for.  It was not an ideal fix, but it worked after many hours of fixing.

I also noticed that the footage was particularly dark, even with the lighting equipment I had available, which is what I was going for, however I have tweaked the gamma, brightness and contrast slightly to bring out the lighter and darker tones in the characters’ faces.  The film still feels quite dark, which works with the tone of the film, but it may have been better to increase the brightness of the LED boards – even though when we were shooting, it looked quite bright, the camera did not pick up as much light as I thought it would.  Even so, I feel the darkness is appropriate for the film.

I opted to rely on just dialogue and action to dictate the mood of my film, rather than using any music which would set the mood.  By only using diegetic sounds, it feels more like we, the audience, are experiencing the film first-hand, as there is no music to tell us how we should be feeling throughout the film.

Whilst the filming and editing process took considerably longer than I would have liked, the final product turned out fairly well.  I would have much preferred to be able to use the audio I recorded on the night, but my solution to this saved me, and I am glad it worked out well in the end.  I would have also liked to have been able to film a few extra shots, but I learned quickly that time management is something I need to improve for my next film project.