I decided that, instead of making each day that I edited into a separate blog, I would just combine all the editing work I did into 3, or maybe 4, blogs, one about the audio, one about the basic visuals (this one) and one about the extra visuals (filters and colour correcting etc) where I can go into detail about what I did, how I did it and what effect it had on the finished film. Although my short film only ended up being a total of around 4 and a half minutes long, it took me over 2 weeks to edit from start to finish. This included putting everything in order and cutting my clips, adding in the audio, and editing that to fit the visuals, as well as all the extra editing like transitions, filters and colour correcting. I only ended up completing all my editing work on Tuesday (21st May) which was way after I originally planned to be done with editing, this meant I didn’t have much time to write my editing blog before uploading my film to YouTube in time to get a decent amount of feedback. In this blog I wanted to go through the different parts of my editing section by section and go into as much detail as possible about what I did and why I did it.

Putting everything in order: This was the first thing I did when I got into the edit suite, I sat down with my shot list and script in front of me for reference and put all the shots in the order they are in on my shot list. I didn’t worry too much about the length of these shots at this point because I knew it would be easier to edit everything once it was in the right place rather than editing individual clips before they were in a cohesive order.

Once everything was in an order that I felt made sense and that matched up with my script and shot list, then I went back and started editing the length and durations of the clips. This took what was initially around 15 minutes of footage down to around 6 or 7 minutes, and then eventually down to 4 and a half minutes by the time all my editing was complete. I think doing my editing in this order really helped me not get overwhelmed or stressed about the individual clips right from the begging and also helped me keep my work true to the initial planning. After editing the length and durations of the clips I could start getting a little more creative with the clips and so started to move some clips around and cut come clips and replace them with a different angle of the same shot etc.

Nightmare sequence: The nightmare sequence was actually one of the first sections of my short film that I edited the style of and added any audio to, I wanted to focus on this part of my film first as I already had a specific vision for how I wanted this took look. I also felt that this was the most important scene to my whole short film and the story and so I felt it deserved the most attention to detail. Since this scene of my film is a dream/nightmare I felt it allowed a lot more room for creativity in terms of editing, I didn’t need to worry about continuity as much as I did for the rest of the film and there was more room for the style to be much more disjointed and jumpy. 

I started editing this scene the same way I started editing everything else, by putting all the clips in an order I felt made some sense and that, again, matched up with my original planning. I then added in the audio of the chanting, an edited version and a no edited version to keep the actually dialog clear, and once I had that audio down I could start editing the more ‘creative’ and disjointed parts of this scene. After re-filming and getting a lot of shots of blood dripping down walls and blood pools on the floor etc I could then start adding them into my nightmare sequence. I added in lots of these shots across this scene, and to make it feel more disturbing I cut each of these shots down to around 1 second(ish) each so that the flashes of blood would make the audience feel uncomfortable and squeamish but would still fit in with the idea of sacrifice and Ella’s back and arm wounds.

Focus issues: As I mentioned in my filming blogs and my re-filming blog, I had quite a few issues with getting my camera to focus and so a lot of my footage has a lot of unintentional ‘focus pulls’. Now some of these I wanted to purposely keep in because, in my opinion, I think some of them really do look quite good, however, there were a few shots that, once I had almost finished editing and was looking back at my work, I was really not happy with because of these focusing issues. This meant having to cut out quite a lot of footage from my first two scenes, this took my film from being around 4 minutes 45 seconds to around 4 minutes 25 seconds. To many people 20 seconds probably doesn’t sound like a lot of time but in terms of film and 20 seconds of footage, it really is quite a large chunk of footage I had to remove.

Overall I do think this was for the best and did result in my short film looking better in the end but it was very frustrating as this then left me with random cuts that I had to try and hide. So, again, I was back to getting different angles of these shots and placing them in ways that it would cover the cuts but wouldn’t look like that was their only purpose. There were a lot of card shuffling shots that this was the case in and although I prefer the way it all looks now, it was definitely frustrating to say the least.

Title and credits: Although this seems like the easiest and least concerning part of the editing process, I actually went back and forth for quite some time when I was deciding how I wanted these two elements to look. Since my title is placed a few shots in, you can’t ignore it or miss it and so there is more pressure for it to fit the horror aesthetic and to look like it fits there rather than look like it was just thrown in. I tried a lot of different fonts, some more traditional and gothic and some more modern and bold, I ended up going for a ‘stencil’, ‘spray paint’ looking font which I personally think fits quite well after all this is a more modern day horror film rather than an older style traditionally gothic horror.

I also mirrored the use of this font in my credits, I think credits are commonly such an afterthought and kind of get thrown at the end with no consideration of how they look so I wanted to make sure they seemed as important to the short film as everything else did. I over-layed the credits text, in the same font as the title, over the shots of blood dripping down the walls etc. I felt this worked quite nicely as these shots had already been seen in the film, even though it was just for a few seconds in the nightmare sequence, and so didn’t seem as random as a black background would seem, in my opinion.

All in all I think the basic editing of putting the clips in their places, editing their lengths and durations, and editing the title and credits all contributes as much to the overall atmosphere, and therefor success, of the film as any other aspect of the pre-production does, and I am very happy I took the time to focus on this.