Today I had a very short time frame to edit my week 4 exercise and so I had to come up with the most efficient way to finish my scene. I started by going through all of the footage and roughly cutting the shots I thought were usable. I ordered them chronologically on the timeline and colour coded the separate shots so I knew which ones were the ‘best’ out of the different takes.

Generally I would try to work off my storyboard as closely as possible. However, with this scene I knew I wasn’t going to be able to follow our original shot list to a tee because of continuity errors we had made during shooting. Thus I essentially had to just join the shots that I thought fitted best together and that didn’t show any signs of technical errors. To aid me in this process I decided to quickly go through all of my cut footage and write down which shots ‘I had to use’ (because there were no other options for the same shot/piece of dialogue) and shots I was considering using and why they might be used. I think it was beneficial to hand write these notes because it allowed me to draw rough diagrams and add linking lines between ideas. Once I physically wrote everything down it was clear that there were really only two shots out of the final four that I wanted to play around with. So I joined the two definite shots I wanted together and then looked at which takes of the other two shots worked best continuity-wise. I found that ‘cutting on action’ was a smooth way to join shots, as well as continuing the audio over from one shot to another.

After roughly assembling the scene, I started to go through the cuts meticulously, making sure they all looked seamless. Then once I was happy with the visuals, I went through the audio, constantly layering sounds from different shots so that there were no sharp or noticeable changes to the background noises throughout the scene. Lastly I added transitions and an adjustment layer which allowed me to colour grade my piece. I find it is best to do these things last, because if you end up changing anything in the visuals it can stuff up the audio or might cause you to have to re-do transitions, which ultimately just wastes time.