We spent two full days in the underground dungeon (the edit suite ^^) this week to finish off our assignment 4. I know this might sound crazy, but it was actually my first time using Premiere Pro, which makes the whole process very interesting and rewarding. I’ve been using Final Cut Pro for a few years, so I decided to keep using it for my Uni assignment (at least for my previous ones). Although I knew that I should probably start switching to Premiere ASAP, I was never brave enough to step out of my comfort zone and make this change, because for me, changing editing tool = losing all previous editing skills = producing academic rubbish.

But for this assignment, I am willing to try out Premiere for the group, because it’s something that the rest of my team members are familiar with. Surprisingly, it has worked out so much better than I imagined. I feel very lucky to be able to work with Chuling because we both love editing – we’ve treated it as something that is more than a school assignment. We wanted to try our very best for this project, so we spent so much time navigating through different functions on Premiere. We were never stopped by the scary settings on Premiere; whenever we had an idea, we would try every way that can achieve it. Within that few days in the edit suite, we’ve watched dozens of tutorial videos, gaining and applying a lot more new editing skills, and finally producing something that we are both happy with in terms of editing.

One of the most exciting attempts we did was trying to apply mask onto our videos. Since we’ve generated a lot of AI footages, we wanted to mash them together in different ways, rather than just layering them or making jump cuts between them. I therefore thought of masking, where I can manually draw a shape, and replace the part within the shape with something else. By selecting and replacing the parts from a clip one by one, the old clip will essentially be replaced by a new clip, like a transition. The results we got from experimenting this was also satisfactory.

This assignment therefore let me realise something new about teamwork – the best and quickest way to learn something is when you are in a group environment (at least for me), because it makes you feel like that you are not facing the challenge alone. There are definitely imperfections in our final video, but I don’t really want to talk about or critique them in this reflection. No matter what grade we will receive for this assignment, I genuinely feel proud for myself and my team, for the attention we paid on the details, the time we dedicated, the challenges that we overcame, and the tolerance and encouragement we gave to each other.