Group: Editing Process

Now that we have completed the second shoot for our music video, we have had a second opportunity to edit new footage as a group.

As with the previous edit which we completed as a group (see previous Editing Process post), we started by reviewing all of the footage together, so we could see the shots that we were most happy with. The shots that we like best from this shoot are the clown shots, the onion eating shots, and the waking up shots. We were also happy with the slow motion glass falling shot. We added this shot to the timeline, and slowed it down to 10% of the original speed. This made the clip too jumpy, and was obvious that it had been slowed down, so we tried with 20% of the speed, and concluded that 30% was the best speed to use.

 However, we noticed that in some of the shots, we have filmed a 'border' beyond the sheet we used as our white background. This did not show on the viewfinder when we were actually filming, so we need to be aware on future shoots that the frame may be larger than we expect. Where this is an issue in the glass falling shot, we cropped the video from both the left and right hand sides, so the frame is actually considerably less wide than other shots, although we feel that this will make the shot stand out even more.

Ben took over as the lead editor in this part of the editing process. We edited the fast-cut flash shots. It seems that only about half of these shots came out where you could actually see Harri, although this was not an issue as we filmed a large amount of these. In each, there was complete darkness, and only a single frame where Harri could be seen by the illumination of the light. We shortened each clip, so the flashes seemed to be only several seconds apart, instead of the minutes apart that they were filmed. We also removed any secondary flashes which some of the footage had, so each flash was a single frame.

The other main part of editing we completed in this lesson was the sequence where Harri tears up a book. The original shot in around 1:00 in length, so we used the time-stretch tool to make the clip 400% faster, and also cut out some parts of the shot that we were less happy with. We had to render the footage after every change, as speeding up the clip means that Premiere Elements has to render everything more for it to be viewed. There was also over 30 shots of Harri throwing paper at the camera, so we cut the beginning of each of these off, so they are very fast paced. We had to remove some of these shots, as a lot of them are very similar and we felt that it looked too much like we had repeated the same footage.

We are very pleased with how the editing process is going, and are looking forward to editing the footage from the other narrative, so we can see how the cutting between the two narratives looks.