Last week we were tasked with editing the footage we shot for the one page script that was written before hand. This was an interesting experience since whenever I was previously involved in a short film I had never done any editing myself. I have edited before but never the footage I shot myself. I was quite pleased that my group decided to shot a mater shot and then do other full takes just from different shots and angles. This allowed me the freedom to cut to my favored shots in any an order I see fit. Since the scene involved movement and the actors couldn’t deliver the exact lines in each take, it made it hard to preserve continuity but it was manageable and I think the end result didn’t suffer too much from this potential issue.

Like I said on my previous post, I do like long takes but only when done well. After having seen what my group filmed in the first week I am glad that we can shot to edit and then edit the actual footage. The clip that I edited last week is much more engaging and interesting as the long take was almost motionless for the majority of the scene and had some framing issues. When making short film I would hear other joking, saying things like “we’ll just fix it in post” but now I can see that there is some truth to those words as the imperfect raw footage can be polished and tweaked to form a scene where I have complete control over pacing and other important details. Since we have the option to add soundtracks and sound effect to the footage it allows us to further enhances the overall quality of the clip. Since I had complete control over the timing of the clip and soundtrack, I was able to match the musical cues with the actions on screen. I attempted to make it as polished as I could since we had to rotate with others but in the amount of time given I was able to almost finish a rough cut.