Short Film - Editing

After the first day of filming on my short film, I started to edit the clips I had together and put them in the correct to make sure that my film run in the corrects order and that all the clips are trimmed down to the correct length so that “action” and “cut” could not be heard at the start and end of each clip that we shot. I also took out the audio at certain parts of my film because it was not useful and I felt like music would not have fit in at these specific parts of the film.

After all of my clips were placed in the correct position and at the correct length, I started to add the soundtrack as well as sound FX that I wanted to use that matched to the specific genre that I was doing. Once I had selected the music and sound FX that I wanted, I had to decide where I wanted to position all of it so that it matched what is happening on the footage which was a challenge at times to get it to play at the right moment for the correct amount of time.

When I was finished with the sound, I moved onto the visuals of my film to make sure that what can be seen on screen, synched up with the audio that was playing alongside the clips while the film was playing. In this small section of the film, the audio was a split second ahead of the visual so I had to go through this section a few times moving the audio left and right so that the dialect matched the person speaking on screen.

Eventually the audio and visual synched up and I was able to move this segment back into the timeline of the film in the correct place and watched it again to make sure that everything in the films timeline was in line and played at the same time.

My entire film, was based around the split screen element at the end (Fincher Effect) was the only part of my editing process that I struggled with. It took me two weeks to get the effect to work as closely to what I wanted it to be like but, it still did not work fully because it is clear to see that the camera had been moved and made one of the shots look bigger than the other which in the end ruined how it was supposed to look. These two shots were meant to be the same distance so both characters look the same size and so that the separation line could not be seen in the shot.