PRODUCTION: Editing The Footage

The editing of the footage was the part that took the most precision within the whole production. This was because the footage that we shot amounted to much over 2 minutes, with roughly 5 minutes of total footage.
I was more suited to using the iMac, which meant I did a lot of the physical editing, including all of the point-and-click style work. We both brainstormed and created the concepts, with Ella supplying a lot of important ideas of footage.

The first step was to cut the footage down, because to have it over 2 minutes would mean an instant failure of the piece. This was actually suprisingly easy, as a lot of the footage was either behind the scenes footage or failed takes. Aftetr cutting this stuff out, and deleting what we didn't need, though, we were still left with about 3 minutes of footage, meaning that some of the story had to be edited out!
Deciding which pieces to cut was mostly a process of working through the footage and deciding which scenes could be shortened, cut completely or edited to look different with other pieces. The decisions we made that were based on film were made entirely as a team, and we both had to sacrifice certain parts of the footage that we really liked to create a better film.

After a lengthy period of cutting footage, we finally had just under 2 minutes, including credits and the production splash for our piece.

The next step, of course, was refinement.
For us, refinement meant making sure that each clip and scene looked as professional as possible. One classic example of this is the fighting scenes that we edited a lot. Due to the way the footage was shot, and various acting abilities, we had to cut out a lot of the fake-fights, because they looked silly and laughable, therefore ruining the atmosphere of the piece.
We also had to change the order of some footage, to create an easier flowing piece of work that was both chronological and logical, making sense even when things were not in the same order as they were before. This also involved splitting some clips and rearranging them, or putting scenes in between clips to create a parallel editing effect of two stories in one.

Sound was the tricky part to add in. Due to the need for non-copyrighted music for our piece, finding the sound was our first challenge. Our teacher recommended a website called http://www.freeplaymusic.com/ for our music, and after only a short while, we found exactly the right piece of music for our clip.
We took it back to the iMac and added it to the movie, to allow us to see and hear how the two pieces of media sounded together. After a little bit of cutting the clip down, splicing the audio to elongate certain parts of it, and lining the correct parts up with the correct clips in the film, we had a nice backing track to fit with our movie!
SFX is another part of the sound process, and we struggled a little more with this. What we wanted to find was a non-copyrighted piece of SFX of a zombie or some form of creature making eating sounds, such as flesh-eating, for the end of the piece. We had to search for a long time to find any professional sounds that were usable, but eventually with some help from our Media teacher, we found a very good sound.
When we copied it onto the iMac, it fit almost perfectly, and Ella added that in certain places, the pitch sounded slightly off-key, so we managed to change and edit the audio clip to fit the piece more effectively.

Finally, we added in a voiceover clip that was recorded onto the iMacs when the editing suite was empty apart from us. First, we planned out our voiceover script, because we didn't want to have an awkward or unprofessional sounding audio clip. The next step was to use the recording feature on the iMac and add in the audio where we thought it was needed, in keeping with our initial ideas.












This led us to finally have our finished movie, meaning that we finished our piece well in time for our deadline, and had a nicely created piece of work.