PRODUCTION: Editing 3

Part 3 of the editing is where things begun to take shape which allowed us to focus on other things. As college was closed on Tuesday, the day we had media as a group to edit, Nick gladly in his spare time decided to continue editing the next day. The fact that the majority of clips we wanted to use had already been chosen, synced with the music and generally worked well at this early stage of editing gave us an advantage. It meant that we had less pressure off our shoulders to rush with the editing and had extra time to fiddle with the full features Final Cut Pro had to offer. Instead of just focusing on selecting shots we want in the video, the edit was developed enough to spend time on individual shots e.g. adjusting playback speed etc... An example was the shot of Poppy running through the woods; initially this shot was about 4 seconds long at normal playback speed. However, once Nick had done his magic adjusting the playback speed of that shot, Poppy in that clip was now running in slow motion.

We also had time look back at other shots and experiment where it can be cut so it can switch back and forth between clips. Below is an example.

Shot 1 Shot 2 Shot 1 (again)

Feedback from the above shots was generally positive among people as they felt it added something different to the video and fit in perfectly with the lyrics and tempo of the song at that stage.

While Poppy was ill, me, Charon and Nick continued to see edit while constantly thinking what can be done to better the video. Being a perfectionist, I kept on highlighting the fact that some shots in the video were a bit to dark in contrast with other shots. This was when Nick had an idea of changing the colour of some shots to brighten it up and make it look more pleasing on the eye. Below is a video of Nick doing just that to one clip I kept on nagging the group about how dark it is in contrast to other shots.

The reason this clip was as it was is because all of our shots (except the projection shots) were filmed in one day. This meant that some shots were recorded in the afternoon in bright sunlight, whereas other shots were recorded in the evening when it got much darker. The camera struggled under dark light conditions hence why we brightened the shot up on Final Cut Pro. To change the brightness, Nick altered the hue and saturation of some shots to make it more pleasing on the eye, easier to see and more natural.

This editing session was so productive that we even decided to tinker with some effects in our video. There were some effects like the one below which we thought were too extreme to put in to the final product. This was because it didn't really match the mise en scene of the song and emotions portrayed and it also looked unprofessional.

We did however sick with one effect in the video. This was one that we messed around with and decided that it actually worked within the video. We added a slight glow to the clip which is enabled on the word "Howl" in the song. This glow we feel just adds extra meaning to the song and is something different among our classmates music videos. You cannot really see the glow in the images below, but in the video it is noticeable. The effect isn't too complicated nor too shallow; it is rather subtle.