So although It’s not finished here is the basic edit of the Shave scene – https://vimeo.com/127236591

I didn’t work quite as well as I aimed for, partly because I think I did not plan the action enough. My basic idea was that while shaving the alien would cut itself, the first hint of its alien properties would be the blue tone of the blood, I thought this might be a bit cliche although on second thought I think it was a decent solution. The idea was then for the alien to enter kind of repair state in which we would see the cut reversed and time rewinded, the shaver would remain bloodied however to signal the continuation of real time. This again did change a bit after I shot, the time reversal didn’t really work as I did not plan the action enough, the visual motion ideally would have been slightly more blurred / abstracted. I also wanted the order of the shots to be symmetrically ordered, with the aliens transformation occurring in the middle, then revisiting and juxtaposing detail shots of the shaver and the sink etc, this time with the addition of the blue blood. This was meant to reinforce the idea of time being reversed, but only for the alien, as we see the objects around him continue temporally. Again, this initial idea did not end up coming off quite as I had envisioned yet though after showing the clip to Robin, much to my relief these alien ideas seemed to come across stronger than I perhaps thought.

I think another area I could have improved upon or utilised more was the sound, thinking back it would have probably been possible to achieve the sense that the guy was an alien purely through the sound. However this Idea only really occurred to me during the editing process so I inserted some ambient sounds and shaving effects, but after searching for far too long I found it was extremely difficult to pinpoint or find the sound I desired. I think it works up until the transformation shot, as such an intense visual moment I could not find a sound piece that supported movement. Everything I found seemed to be cliche or perhaps too overstated or too technological. I think that in a way having a lack of sound detracts from the transformation given that I used so many sound effects before it.