the last step

With all the footages in hand, the next step is therefore editing. Unlike my last project, this time I am editing on my own. Thus, I have more freedom in the whole creative process and have it completely done the way i want it to look.

Editing for this movie is an interesting process, as this project is a little a combination of experimental and narrative and also focuses on dialogues. My movie can be categorised as a thriller, so the role of sound is very important. Usually, I search for background musics that has melody for my videos, but this time the sound I looked for are ambient sounds that could enhance the visual experience by evoking feelings of thrill and suspense. In a blog post, Baker explained how “[a] perfect use of sound effect can make your audience squirm and trigger reactions they’ve never felt, expanding their imagination and immersing them completely.”

Freesound.org is a really great audio archive that provides all sorts of sounds for free, which is where I found most of the sounds. Of course, there’s quite a proportion of time that I spent until I found the right sounds to use. I learned that these sound files can be quite big in size, so good internet would really save time.

Then, there were the visual part of the editing. For the opening scene, I combined shots of identical frames with the girl being in different parts of the frame to create the jump shots effect. It’s kind of an establishing shot as it is quite wide, and the juxtaposition of her to her spacious environment, according to Kroll in a post, is a great way to show the isolation of the character. At first, i had the shots transition from one to the other from 3 seconds to less than a second, but the feedback i got was to not make it cut too fast as it was hard to follow but instead have the last shot go longer before the transition to the night shot, to create more surprise during the next transition. Someone else also suggested to fix the rhythm of the cuts so I cut them according to the sound of a ticking clock, at the same time to create feeling of unease.

From there, I did an abrupt transition from the natural sunlight scene to dark artificial light scene. What I hoped to do here was to surprise the audience with something they don’t see coming. Here, I incorporated sounds that is tranquil but at the same time ominous while i assemble shots of just the character. Then, there were just shots over shots of the character in her moment, inviting the viewers to do so to, with lots of anticipation and questions, before a voice just appears and she opened her eyes.

The tracking shot of the door was accompanied by a slowly ascending chilly tone and chimes, the visuals cutting between her eyes and the tracking shot of the door, creating a heightening suspense. Then, there was an overlay inspired by movies such as The Shining and The Last Detail, creating a nice effect of seeing what the girl sees while at the same time seeing her facial expression.

the shining

the last detail

 

 

 

 

 

The rest of the film was cuts between the girl and the door talking. Here, I had to match the audio recorded by the H4n and match it to the visual, and for the door, I had to make the sound realistic as it is from the other side of the door. I found the tutorial to do so in premiere which I’ll elaborate in this post. The most important thing I think is to make the conversation sounds natural, and so we have to cut them at the right timing, or it’ll sound awkward. I also experimented on whether or not I should use background music or sfx during the conversation, and ended up with one since it supports the mood.

To polish things off, I did some colour grading to make sure the colours are consistent throughout, same goes to the volume. Then, it’s pretty much done. All in all, it’s a pretty interesting experience to edit a thriller type of movie, the sound effects are definitely the most interesting (editing alone at night especially), as well as the conversations.

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