Thriler Film - Editing Process

After we finally finished our filming, we uploaded it to our set computer and started to edit.
We firstly cut out all the mis-haps during filming, and were left with 1 or 2 best versions of each shot. We decided which version to use throughout all of them, and started to peice it all together, getting it in the right order that we needed.
After we had done this, we started to add titles. We had wanted to make the titles come in as in someone was typing them, however we did no know how to do this without wasting valuble time. So instead, we sorted through the effects given, and chose to make it "curtain" in and out, similar to what we had in mind. The font was "Courier" and in bold, and the colour was white. This was because it looked like a typwriter, and the bold and white made it stand out more, making it easier to read on the film background. We used the same font for the end title "The Wrong Move" though it was bigger, centered, and didn't have any effects coming in or out. We edited in the gun shot to go when the title showed, as this meant the audience didn't see who got shot and who did the shooting.
At the time of editing and rendering, and uploading to youtube, we didn't know Jakob's candidate number, so we left it as "0000". It will be added in under the blog when we upload it.
When we had finally created the start title, end title, and the actors and production company title's (the production company was "JRC" standing for Jakob, Roxxy and Caroline) we decided to upload it to youtube.
However, we found the edited footage to be 3 minutes and 44 seconds, which was too long for our project. We went back to our computer after half term to shorten it down. This proved to be harder than it sounds. We cut out a whole shot of Jakob and Ben (Simon & Gang Leader) talking next to the house, as the next shot was pretty similar. We cut shots down to make them shorter, and sped up some slow ones, and finally got the footage down to 2minutes (and 5 seconds for the starter title). This actually made our film look better, and we all thought it was better than the longer one. This was because the shots were shorter and faster cut, making our film more fast paced, allowing the audience to be more drawn in to the action.
However, just before we got it down to 2mins 5secs, we had 1 second left to cut out, and the computer we were working on froze, and wouldn't let us edit any more. Luckily, the program we were using had auto save, and had saved about 10 minutes before, leaving us with only 9 seconds to still edit out, which was extremely good news to us.
After we had completely finished editing, we uploaded the new and improved version onto youtube, where we found the gunshot had not been included. However, aparently this doesn't matter as the examiners will receive our film on a disk, from the avi file we have saved onto the computer, which has the gunshot in it.

Thriller FIlm - Filming Process

Our first attempt at shooting went ok, but when we came to edit we found a number of problems with the captured material. These problems included such things as our camera making some of our film blurry, and when we uploaded it the movement wasn't smooth, as the pc skipped a couple of frames, making it jumpy, affecting the overall look of our peice.
Also, we decided that some aspects of the outfit "Simon" was wearing in the shooting weren't suitable or good enough for his character, so by re-shooting some shots and scenes we were able to make sure the continuity and costumes were more appropriate.
After we changed the costume, and some of the shots,the filming became alot easier and ran alot smoother.


(Late December & Early January)
We encountered another more serious problem towards the end of 2008, as the main pc's hard drive malfunctioned, losing many files from the designated pc. This included the filming for our thriller, and the already edited bits. We were unable to retreive the files, so we had to start filming again from the start, and editing. This put us behind the other groups, as some of them were close to finishing editing, however our teacher gave us an extension to complete editing and our evaluation, giving us a chance to improve our footage and learn from our mistakes. This worked quite well as we sorted out our character casting problem, and helped us see what we needed and what we didn't.
However, after we finished filming and editing, we disvoered our film was 1min and 44 seconds too long.
We are in the process of cutting it down, which proves harder to do than it sounds.