Production Journal - Editing Week

This week was our editing week, and with a bank holiday on our first day only leaving us 3 days to edit, we worked fast. This didn't mean we rushed a edit, at the end of this week, I had 4 or 5 drafts of my advert finished, but time was always a factor in my mind, I wanted my edit finished for when we came into our final week so I knew I could concentrate on other stuff and not have to rush, other stuff being any unfinished work (not only in this brief but others) and polishing what we already have.

With the first day of editing, I concentrated on just getting everything into a timeline, the order of my shots, the music, the voice over, sound effects. Once I did that, I played with them a little to see what worked, what didn't and to try and get a real "trailerish" vibe. In the end, it came out as a slow paced, quite atmospheric piece, this really set the tone for my other drafts. During my 2nd draft, I started to create a more fast paced segment to go after the dialogue ends, when it came to this however, we found we needed more shots, the ones we had created a slow vibe, and the parts we used to quicken the advert wasn't that interesting. Before we ventured out, we decided to re-record our voice over, as our old one was a little underperformed and a bit half arsed. With our new voice over finished we ventured out to get a few more interesting shots, we had to think of shots that would be over in a few seconds but would still leave the viewer with something, whether that be an emotional response, or whether it just be them remembering that particular part. I had a few ideas of a character barging through double doors, or looking up into the sky, but Cannon had a lot of ideas that really took advantage of a tiny woodland area in college, he basically took the camera into this wood and got us an entire chase scene full of interesting shots. He also gave me a quick tutorial on Motion to create our titles, I don't know enough to write a technical journal about it as I only used a template. 

The template I used creates text that fades, giving a eerie title that fits with my trailer.

The template does everything for you really, I saw Cannon creating his from scratch to create the hospital heart monitor that is dominate throughout the trailer.

Once saved, I found my created titles in Final Cut in Master Templates.

For my next draft, I used the extra shots to make a more interesting fast paced portion of my trailer, and I also gave the slow beginning bit more of an atmospheric unsettling nature with music imported from Garageband, I colour corrected to give the impression of bleach white hospital corridors. It was really coming along but I was still missing something vital, birds. With a quick look in Garageband, I imported everything I could find to do with bird noises, most went out the window straight away but when I started to mix birds with my already imported music, the birds suddenly started to seem sinister and threatening.