Editing Process - 19/01/12

In today's lesson, our teacher began to introduce us into the world of editing. We discussed the mail elements that needed to be within our trailers, which were transitions, sound, cutting and image. All four of these elements need to work in harmony together for the trailers to work perfectly. In consideration to sound, Daniel has emailed the record label that handles Placebo so that we may gain permission to use their song "Running up that Hill" for our trailer. We chose this song because it is slow, progressive, creepy and the lyrics even fit the theme of our film trailer: "so much hate for the ones we love..." Our teacher also told us how important image is to our trailer, for instance, getting the right verisimilitude to suit our genre. Obviously, having lots of bright colours and lights is not the image that we would want for our horror trailer!

We discussed the different transitions that can be used in all trailers, as well as short films as one group in our class is creating a short comedy film. There is the most popular transition, the fade in/out, which would be a useful for a horror trailer like ours, as it gives a supernatural/ghost-like effect and creates a build up of tension. Dissolve is another good transition, however it would not be suitable for our trailer as it doesn't have a scary feel to it. For a comedy trailer, the wipe transition is perfect and preferably used. It would definitely not be suitable for our trailer as it would make it too childish or parodied.

We discussed the different types of cutting techniques that we could used in our trailers/short films. A shot/reverse/shot is a cut used for filming conversations, as it films something, then cuts to another thing, that cuts back to the original 'something' for example, a frame of person A would then cut to person B and then back to person A, to show the audience that they have some form of relationship as they are in conversation with one another. An eyeline match edit is where there is a shot of someone's face in close-up, then it cuts to the thing that the person is looking at, so that the audience can see that they looking at it, and it highlights the objects importance in the scene. For example, a close-up of a persons face, that then cuts to a telephone. Therefore we can assume that the person is about to use the telephone. An action match is similar to this, with the difference that it simply matches the action that happened in the previous scene. A good example of this is when a person is filmed about to open a door, and the scene cuts to the other side of the door, being opened by the very same. Sometimes it can also be that the first scene is of person A about the open the door, and the next scene is action matched by person B walking through the door.

Daniel and I also decided to create a bullet pointed list of what we still need to do. The list looked like this:

• Take photo's for the magazine and poster
• Get footage of mise-en-scene/filler scenes i.e. weapons, the clock etc
• Get some more shots of the magician and finish his filming
• Attempt a different jump cut