Vlog on Editing Process

Vlog on Editing Process

Tinika and I created a vlog about the strengths and struggles we had during our editing process.

The first problem we came across was the number of shots we had used. Initially we decided we wanted to have lots of shots so, we could build tension by having lots of quick cuts. We soon realised this was much more difficult than we first anticipated as it started to look like a film opening as we began putting them in chronological order which is not typically something you do in a film trailer.

Serif Movie Plus X6 was the software we used to edit on and was very difficult to use, even though we had previous experience on Serif Movie Plus X6. This was due to it crashing all the time and the quantity of film we had was a fair amount which made it even more difficult to edit on as it became even slower to use. We also wanted to add more features/effects on our film trailer. This is due to the fact we had gained knowledge about media studies as we had been studying it a lot longer compared to the last time we had to create a media text. As a result of this, we knew Serif Movie Plus X6 was not able to provide us with all the effects we needed and had to resort to another editing site.

Before we changed editing sites, we opened all our footage on to Serif Movie Plus X6 and we began opening them all up and sorting between the clips we could and couldn't use. This was due to the fact a lot of the clips we filmed were either trail runs or had a lot of mistakes/bloopers. This took up a lot of time as we had to go through and delete everything or crop the lengths of the videos to make sure they were suitable to use. However, the deleted clips were put into a file that we called 'bloopers' in case we wanted to make a blooper video. However, we ended up not doing this as the school system crashed and some files were lost, including our bloopers. We were lucky enough to have everything else backed onto a memory stick.

To start creating our film trailer, we located our storyboard so we could refer back to it to help us get an insight into our first initial plan. We realised from looking at the storyboard that it contained a lot of short scenes, which was good however, we had a few problems with the amount of short scenes we added therefore, we had to merge and cross fade a lot of our short clips. 

After doing so, we looked at different films that were action/thrillers such as Gone Girl, Jurassic World and Inception. Then, we looked into the conventions of these specific genres and decided we would note down some conventions that we were able to copy. These included blackouts to create tension and fast paced cuts to build suspense. We chose different bold fonts to intrigue our audience too. 

Initially we had narrowed it down to two different soundtracks we liked the sound of. We decided to not add any sound until we had completed our trailer to see which sound track went the best with our film trailer. Unfortunatly, we still couldn't decide and ended up cross fading the two. This worked really well until we tried to edit the music to change on a beat drop. This ended up messing up all the work we had done with the two soundtracks and we both decided it was best to just stick with one. 
Eventually, we ended up choosing the one which sounded more like an action film to really stick to our genre and reinforce it. 

We added some effects to our trailer to make it more engaging. We added a blur effect to our protagonist as she was screaming to make it look as though she was exhausted. We also added a slow motion effect to the clock to make it seem as though time was taking forever to pass. These two effects were added to build tension to our film trailer.