In second time of editing, I paid attention to some aspects Paul and me talked through before, like audio-sound effect, timing, continuity and different type of cuts and so on. The most thing I found is that the timing of cut is important in editing, the spare shots are not good and usually confuse audience in some degree. An editor needs to be very sensitive about the timing of cut and try ti make it simple, understandable, and cool. To get rid of the spare shots, when editing, you can pull the progress bar to make it more detailed, and you can catch the perfect cut you want from a slower progress bar. If there is some spare time during cut to cut, it is odd to watch, you can try by yourself, it’s like the actors are waiting for his/her line, a bit intentional, but this is also related to actor’s performance which I will talk about in next paragraph.

Communicate well with actors is also important for a director. The two actors in my scene are my friend, and they are not professional which means I need to talk with more about their characteristic, what kind of personalities I wish them have, what kind of ways I want them to show it to audience, what is their motivations in this situation, what kind of tone, gesture, eye contact or body language they can add to express ‘themselves’ in a better way. Also, a director needs to remind them of imagination, to tell them this is not acting, it’s for real, put yourself in that situation and relationship, not just reading the lines to each other. From two shooting exercises, I realized that I need to keep reminding them that kind of stuff. Actors usually need to know what they are doing, who are they, where are they, who they are with and what’s the relationship between them and others… Anyway, director should have good and frequent communication with actors, and lead, inspire and get common sense with them. However if I am working with people who are experienced in acting or who is a professional, it would be different and better. I’m looking forward to working real actors in future.

About audio

when shooting, the conversation between two actors is recorded, but it’s not the only sound recorded by the mic. The noise in the shooting location is also recorded. To get rid of the noise as possible as I can, I did the adjustment on the whole track of sound, so that is why the sound is pretty small in my editing. The noise is still there, but not very obvious. I record the sound in addition, when I put it in, I found the sound and the video don’t have the same rhythm. So it does’t work eventually. This reminds me that next time if I have to record sound in addition, let the actors look at their performance and read lines at the same time. (Is this the only way? what other manners i can use?) In this way, it will be much better, I guess? About the audio continuity, there are some shots in it, actors are not talking, just some body movements, then I unlinked the audio and video, and get rid of audio, this make audio continuity bad. It just sounds not that natural, it’s like noisy, then suddenly quite, no sound at all, then sound again, I mean the sound besides the dialogue, the noise the camera caught naturally. Is the only way to avoid this problem is to record sound in addition?