Editing is probably the area in all of this project that I feel the most comfortable and confident, I really enjoy editing and feel like I have a good understanding of what looks good and how I can achieve that. I’m regards to this project, and in my opinion, for horror in general, the editing can make or break it and is in many ways the most important part of creating a good short horror film. For my editing I used colleges edit suite and edited my work on Final Cut Pro, I have edited all bar one project on this software so feel the most confident with it and so felt it would be the safest bet to use it for this project as it is so important. I want my editing to help build up suspense and bring all my footage together in a coherent and interesting way that helps captivate the audience, and in the nightmare sequence (scene 3) I want the editing to be a little more disjointed and, well, dream-like. I plan on doing all of this with strategic cuts and angle changes as well as using the audio and music, which I will write a different blog about, to help built the atmosphere of terror.

I am, so far, around half way through my editing, I have put all the clips together in an order and format I think will work well, and have started by working on making it look cohesive and professional. As well as this, I have also started working on the more stylistic cuts and edits in the nightmare sequence. I wanted to focus on the nightmare sequence first as it is, in a way, it’s own stand alone scene and so doesn’t need to have any continuity to the scene before it or the scene after it, where as the other scenes do have to focus more on the continuity. The nightmare sequence is going to be a lot more disjointed and artistic in comparison to the other 3 scenes and so I wanted to spend a lot more time figuring out what atmosphere I wanted to create with this and how I would create that through editing.

As this blog is only to discuss the beginning of editing, I of course am not able to talk through everything I will do in terms of editing as the more ‘technical’ editing is yet to come. However, there were a few things I have learnt while editing this and a few issues I came across.

First of all, after putting my clips in order, there was one shot I wanted to focus on first as I had a very specific view of how I wanted this to look, this shot is the 2nd into 3rd shot of my short film. In this shot Ella throws her keys onto the bed which happen to have a Satan key ring attached to it, I had the idea of freezing this scene and having the title come on screen over this lil’ devil. This serves as a great shot for the title to come onto as it makes sense with the name of the film, “Satan’s Game”, but is also used to foreshadow the later events and to give the audience the idea that our main character is somehow involved in Satanism from the very begging. I did not know how on Earth, or in hell, to do this as I had never done an edit like this on earlier projects, however the solution was pretty simple. The short cut for this tool is to select the clip and then press Alt and F and this adds in a freeze frame that I could lengthen or shorten to my desire, this tool is also at the bottom of the ‘edit’ tab at the top of the screen while using Final Cut Pro.

Once I had gotten into the editing I realised I wanted to re-film a few clips, which will be another blog, but needed a way to remember what I wanted to film and where I would put it in editing once I had the footage. This is when my friend Ella showed me the ‘placeholders’, these are still clips you can put in to take the place of a non existing clip. I have put quite a few in my edit so far so that I know where I wanted them and what I wanted them to look like by adding little descriptions to the placeholders. This won’t effect my edit at all once it is complete but felt it was worth writing about as it has become really helpful for me and has helped me be able to order my thoughts and what I need to do next.

I haven’t really used many other techniques so far apart from the ‘blade’ tool and shortening and lengthening clips which isn’t too impressive. I will write another blog going more in depth about my editing once I have delved into the more exciting and technical aspects of it but for now this blog was really just to reflect on my first few editing sessions.