Last week Robin gave me the task of editing my previous obstructions together to create a conversation complete with both parts. The brief was to create two edits, one which would favour the formal characteristics of each piece and one that would favour the dialogue. another request was to shorten them to around 2:30 in length and cut the fat so to speak.

Dialogue

I thought this restraint was the easier of the two and so I aimed to edit the two clips around the conversation, shortening it where possible but still aiming to retain a natural flow and progression. I think I achieved this relatively well but the main challenge proved to be shorting the timeframe down to 2:30. Although the conversation itself lasted for around that time I struggled to find a way to reduce it down that far without sacrificing visual continuity in the movement or what the logical progression of the conversation. As a result the total timeframe of the clip ended hovering around 3:20.

Formal

In attempting to edit the clips in favour of the formal qualities, I found that what I was really aiming for was to attempt to give the characters a similar amount of agency both visually and in the division of the conversation. I started the sequence from scratch as a means of attempting to distance myself from the dialogue edit in case I ended up replicating its structure.

The first challenge was giving the characters an equal visual agency, which was already somewhat skewed as within the second obstruction the formal restriction of close up only allows the audience to empathise with the female character more in comparison to the first obstruction.the lighting also creates reinforced this disparity as it was much softer and warmer to the female character in the second obstruction compared to the males lighting in the first obstruction. I tired to manipulate this difference in my favour to define the characters with some colour grading to accentuate light and tone of each characters space.

I managed to knock of a further 20 secs of the conversation so the formal edit hovers just under 3:00 however I think I encountered the same problem with shortening the clip as the dialogue edit. I found that in the process of shortening the clips the visual agency of the characters was, in most cases, restricted and inherently tied to which lines the characters spoke and so my attempts to balance their agency became somewhat compromised in an effort to maintain the continuity of the action and conversation. The result was that the formal edit also became very focused on the dialogue and so its structure was also quite similar to the first dialogue edit.

I think that with further tinkering I could shorten it a smidgen, maybe I am just too close to the material and I simply need to re-approach it from a different angle perhaps sacrificing continuity in order to distill it back more to its basic qualities.