The process of editing our film has been an interesting one and definitely not the way I’d like to edit projects in the future. Because our group has such conflicting schedules and it seems no one is willing to bend besides Pat and myself it has been a really dysfunctional editing process. To describe it briefly to you it started with Ciara and Ally editing on Wednesday after class, Pat and I picking up from them on Thursday, then Pat and Izzi meeting up after that and up until now (Monday 10/9) Izzi editing what ever is left of the film to present a rough cut for our Tuesday class.

This sort of chain effect of the editing process has really in my opinion sucked, it’s really hard to edit a film (especially a film that relies heavily on editing to really showcase the footage) like the one we have this way. When Pat and I walked into the edit suite to see what Ciara and Ally had done it had really been difficult to pick up where they finished off. I feel as if Izzi had some idea of the direction Pat and I went in with our version edit because Pat met up with her and they worked together on the project for a while. I’ve never really edited a group project like this before and I hope I never have to again, because everyone has their own individual editing styles and when everyone goes in at different times it can be hard to culminate that into one final project.

However besides this the time I have spent (thus far) editing our project has been really great, Pat and I were in an editing suite for about three hours on Thursday basically putting together all the clips into a sequence on a timeline, we played around with a lot of different things like the speed, rhythm and duration of the clips as well as the order. We started with establishing shots of the house and the room before moving onto the other motifs of the room that are integral to the piece. After we established an order of the clips we fixed the duration, played around with the pace (speeding up clips by 150%) and reversing the clips so that they went backwards etc. We did this with a lot of clips that were ‘back-to-back’ you could say but we tried to make it in a way so that the audience member will feel almost uncomfortable with the pace. For example having a continuous amount of clips playing at 150% with rapid quick cuts (kinetic editing) but then by the time the audience will have adapted to the pace of this we’d slow the pace down. This was done in different ways in various parts of the film to create uneasiness within the audience but within the film.

It was really cool editing with Pat because while we were editing we were coming up with small different things that looked really great. For example trying to create a glitch effect with one of the clips, another example would be trying to use the different camera angles on one movement to give the audience different perspectives and angles. This is why I love editing because these sort of things don’t naturally come to you while you’re shooting or planning the edit.  I found it really great editing with someone else because you can both learn off each other, like techniques, skills and shortcuts within the program or editing in general.

Unfortunately I had to leave to go to work but when I left we had pretty much finished up putting all the clips into the timeline and we were basically just trying to cut them so they were clean and polished. Colour grading this will be another great test, I’m not sure if that is where Izzi is up to at the moment, but it’ll still be a huge task to finish off because the colour is so important to show off the cinematography of our piece.

I’m really excited to see the rough cut and polish off the piece with our feedback from James on Tuesday this week, at first I was very apprehensive about this piece but now after editing it I am very keen to see how it will turn out.