Becoming the Editor

For the production of River, I will be editing the shots, sound effects and the music together. I will be using Final Cut Pro X on a Macbook. Editing is new to me so I will have to teach myself how to use this program. Luckily, Final Cut is a very intuitive program and understanding how it works will not take long. When I do encounter problems, I can search for the problem on the support forums and usually I can correct these problems effectively. Thankfully, I was able to use my knowledge that I gathered when editing the test footage.

I have begun editing River. This is using the footage that we captured on Sunday 18th March. This footage included one scene that plays after the opening scene of the film. Editing this footage before the rest of the film is shot allows me to understand and create the general atmosphere and pacing of the film.  Firstly, I add the shots into the timeline in the appropriate order. This allows me to set up the flow of the scenes shots. I then start to cut down the shots until they are as small as they can possibly be, I then rearrange the shots until they make sense continuity wise. Once the shots are set up, I then add the appropriate audio tracks such as foley, music or speech files.

I make sure that these audio files are appropriately loud enough and are synced up with the video above it. This can be somewhat time consuming as getting the audio synced is very precise.

For this scene, I had to add the title of the film as it is the opening. This meant that I had to decide on the appropriate font and colour of the title. I also had to decide on how the title should come into view. I ended up fading each letter in and out independently.

I used background shots of nature and manufactured objects interacting, this allows the title to stand out and also makes the title shot tie into the film instead of becoming a fourth wall break of information.

Once I've finished the editing of the scene's continuity and audio, I then add colour correction to each shot. This adds personality and uniformity to each shot while also keeping every shot understandable and pleasing to the eye.

This is how the colour correction panel looks and I have added a green tint to this shot to bring out the natural feel of the scenery. This look should apply to most of the film but if other shots offer a different feel, the colour correction will change accordingly to keep the personality of the film consistent.