When I wrote my proposal, I had a good idea of what I was going to do and why:

– Investigate the relationship between production and post-production

– Consider how my conscious editing choices are ‘successful’ in leading audiences to interpret the scene in a particular way

– Evaluate my skills – how do the edits done by non-media students weight up against my own?

Only in hindsight do I realise how I ignored some of these objectives. Though I set out to do these things, after a while, I fell into the trap of just wanting to film something ‘good’. I think this is also because I saw my peers’ work, and they seemed to be producing such ‘good’ things that I wanted to do the same. Nevertheless, I was still able to make some observations from my investigation.

In regards to interpretation of the story and characters, a few people did interpret it exactly as in the original (it was based off a scene from Chungking Express) but others gave much more imaginative answers than I expected. One thing I forgot to do was to decide what story I was trying to convey with my edits, and then ask audiences whether they interpreted that way. Part of my investigation was to see whether my edits were ‘successful’ or not, but I became distracted and forgot to do this completely.

In investigating the relationship between production and post-production, a lot of people edited the footage the way I expected them to – using the establishing shots, mid shots for a bit more detail, close up of the letter for convenience. I think with my selection of shots, I did ‘lead’ them into cutting the scene a specific way which is why a lot of the edits are quite similar.

Generally, I found that media people were much more accepting of non-conventional shots and editing choices compared to “non-media” people. Especially for the CU shot of Kai and the glass I used in ‘Weird’, every single editor and non-media person I surveyed did not like that shot – it was the only shot that remained unused by the other editors – even Daniel didn’t use it and he managed to use almost every other shot available. In contrast, my peers from The Scene found that it was unique and still an acceptable shot, they responded much more positively to it. Furthermore, most editors seemed to have a ‘the more, the better’ mindset when editing and I guess thought that they should use as many shots as they could.

Another thing that was constantly brought up was performance. While filming, I directed my actors to perform neutrally (although in a few shots, I did direct them to look sad or nonchalant), but people were often distracted by this. They would tell me the acting is robotic and emotionless, and that it detracted from the scene. I do agree with them that it may have been emotionless, but that was apart of my plan. I guess this was my way of using the ‘Kuleshov effect’, I thought it would help to garner some mixed interpretations of the characters and the mood of the scene.

In terms of their engagement with the material, some editors were more earnest than others – but sometimes this is not reflected in their final edit. For example, my sister, Lena, was much more engaged and spent longer contemplating her editing choices, reviewing the edit, and re-doing things, but all this contemplation didn’t show in her edit. Other subjects, for example Jessica and Stephanie, spent probably a third of the time but received much more positive feedback than Lena.

When I surveyed people asking them to guess which edits were mine – most of them were able to spot 2 of 3. (Robin, you were the only one who guessed 3 out of 3). These results are quite surprising, I didn’t think people would identify Less Weird as mine because, for me, Weird stood out more between the two. Also, my media peers didn’t expect the One Take to be my edit because I didn’t cut/edit the scene at all. So for non-media people, they expected more conventional editing  (maybe it’s because they are used to this) and for my media peers, they expected less conventional edits.

All in all, I would say my observations are more or less common-sense type things. I think I would have been able to get more out of this investigation if I actually followed the proposal I set out in the beginning. If I were to do this again, I would follow a similar process but have different versions of the scene where the actors are blocked out in a few ways and perform with different tones and gestures. Of course, the most important point would be to follow my plan.