In my last two blog posts, I mentioned about how I worked with a post-production company over the summer break for a good two and half months. I also mentioned that I aim to learn how to construct the right shot while employing proper filmmaking techniques in order to achieve something that is easy to work with in post. Something that requires no, if not, very little clean up.

What I’ve learned over the span of my internship, I realised editing helped masked many mistakes that were done during the shoot. The director and crew may or may not be aware of the mistake, however, once it reaches the editing stage, these mistakes become really obvious. It could be something like a conti issue with the shots, jump cuts, or maybe even a director not liking the face of a cameo and have to choose a different take, shot, or different parts to cut. I never really understood the role of an editor and the challenges that comes along with the role, until I started my internship. One thing I did know was that an editor is holds on of the key roles in the filmmaking process as his or her name appears as part of the opening titles before the movie starts, that has to say something about an editor right?

So in this semester, I aim to learn the skills required to construct the right shot for post. Understand why there’s a need for the saying “fixing it in post” and also pick up what goes behind building a set from scratch whether it’s a low budget student project or a highly funded Hollywood blockbuster. My focus would be mainly editing, as I have mentioned in my earlier posts that I have found a deep liking for offline editing and workflow management. However, over the course of my internship, I have grew a bit of an interest in some graphic effects like texts tracking, compositing and more which can be done on After Effects, (something which I have yet to explore or to even open up from the adobe creative cloud).

I hope I am not getting ahead of myself, being too ambitious with what I would like to achieve by the end of the semester when this studio approaches the business end of things. I guess it’s better to have abundant of ideas and then slowly starting narrowing down and chiseling off the excess and start focusing on something more. But as I said before, I am really keen on the realm of editing and what revolves around, however, I don’t think I can get much editing done without having any footage, hence the need for going out to shoot, and shoot, and shoot some more till I have a decent bank of footage that I can play around with in editing. As in one of the exercise, this footage need not be representational, and it could be purely abstract, and hopefully make some sense out of it when it comes to editing the footages together into one sequence. There’s nothing more satisfying than putting something together that doesn’t make sense at the beginning but as it starts to unfold and tell a narrative, and then becomes a story at the end.