TV News | The Edit

To ensure we completed everything in time, we decided to take on individual parts of the film to edit before we combined each element and worked on the main edit together.

• Jason took on the bulk of the package edit
• Melissa put together the 'science behind hangovers' segment of the package, as this would involve a lot of thought and planning
• Katie edited the live segment, overlaying the GVs we had shot on the day
• I edited the 30 second promo and put the studio segments on the timeline - I also worked in After Effects for the graphics.
• Once all these were put together in a rough edit, I put them all onto the master edit so I could fine tune the audio, music, grading and GFX with everybody else chipping in.

Feedback from Helen and Sam

After our rough edit was put together, Sam and Helen both gave us feedback on how to improve:

• Sam suggested we alter the blurring effect on the onion, so that we did not waste so much of the screen, so we tweaked the blur levels and added a title graphic so that there was more going on in the frame.
• He also commented on the background we had used, as he felt it looked cheap and flat, however we explained that this was the aesthetic we were going for, as if I (the presenter) was a paranoid conspiracy theorist and we were shooting from my 'bunker'.
• Sam and Helen both mentioned that not all the GVs in the opening studio segment matched the words being said, therefore we changed them to appropriate shots - for example, when I mention Katie and John, I cut to a shot we took whilst rehearsing the interview so that we could put pictures to words.
• Sam also wanted us to make the quiz a bit more exciting with some sounds and graphics, which we have now done.
• Helen pointed out some continuity issues in the package which have now been rectified, and she suggested we add short sound effects to give more life and excitement to the piece, which we have since done.
• She also felt that the studio segments and packages needed some stings to link them all together with a better flow.

We ran into a few issues with the edit:

• The pre-recorded package ended up being about 30 seconds longer than we had wanted, so we had to cut a lot of the package down.  Helen suggested that we could cut the opening part out, as it was originally quite dry compared to the rest of the package, but we wanted to keep it, so we trimmed parts from the whole thing down and added graphics and sounds to make the explanation run better.
• Although it saved us a lot of time to edit from different systems, it was a bit annoying having to transfer different tidbits of footage and audio that not all of us had available.
• Something went wrong with the After Effects intro graphics in that the font changes for several frames.  I have tried many possible solutions to this, but I was unable to rectify it without eating away at time I could spend completing the entire project.
• We also had a small disaster shortly before we planned to export the project, as a lot of the text graphics had disappeared from the timeline - this was likely an accidental deletion somewhere along the timeline that we did not notice, so this also wasted some time.

It was not all doom-and-gloom, however, as I am quite proud of the final product - in particular:

• The text graphics work nicely - I wanted to make it look like black label tape, and I feel I achieved this effectively.
• I also added the titles to soundbites, which is something else I picked up from Viper's View.  This is a common feature of online video, and so it is apt for our project as well.
• The pacing has turned out quite well, I think the whole piece has a nice flow to it
• I think the promo has turned out a lot better than I anticipated with my improvised dialogue - this has certainly complimented the theme and tone of the brand.
• Melissa came up with a really smart idea of making the package flow better by speeding up some of the clips from Jason's demonstration which made it easier for her to edit and gave the visuals a bit of excitement and action.
• The stings that Helen suggested we do also bring the piece together and link each segment together nicely.

I would have liked to have added some motion tracking to the text for Jason's package, but this was something I was not familiar with in After Effects, so it would not have been wise to try with what little time we had remaining.  I should have perhaps tried this out before going into the edit so I knew what I would be doing later on - this is a skill I would still like to learn and I will endeavour to do so.