I am further into my editing now but still with a long way to go, I have put all the clips in order, roughly edited the length and placement of them all, and decided which clips I want to re-film. At this stage I am very much ready to move onto the more artistic and stylistic editing, like playing around with colour grading, layering clips and deciding on the audio and how I want that to effect the atmosphere of my short film. I honestly had hoped I would have been further ahead than I am but now it’s just a matter of making the most of the time I have left on this project, I was hoping to be near finishing my edit by now but with still some shots to re-film and audio to find, I am realising I am only around half way done. Regardless, yesterday my mentor, Andrew, came through to see the rough edit of my work and to give me some feedback on it so far. He said he was happy with the work he was seeing and that I do have the potential to create something great, which is really what I am aiming for, but that I will really have to pull it all together through my editing and the style and direction I end up taking my film in because of the final edit.

All of this gave me the idea to look back at my work from last years FMP, I was extremely proud of my editing in last years work and think it was the strongest point of my work in that project. As last year was also horror, it work so well to use for inspiration, and because I did end up loving the way it transformed my work I thought I could use similar editing styles this time around. As well as looking at the finished product of last years work, I also wanted to look at some of my editing blogs from last year to really see what I did to get the effect I did. However, there is one key difference between my work last year and my work this year that makes using the EXACT same editing styles a bit harder. Last year I was creating a trailer and campaign for a film I had made up and was trying to sell to an audience, and so, because it was a trailer and because of the style I was going for, I didn’t have to worry about keeping any continuity or telling much of a story as it was just a trailer. This year I am creating a short film, meaning my editing must keep up with the story and plot of the film and not interfere with any of the continuity to help that everything makes sense for the audience.

First thing I wanted to look at is any inspiration blogs I wrote last year about any ideas I had for editing and then anything I wrote about planning my editing, I remember being very inspired by American Horror Story, and in particular, the title scenes for their shows. I loved the editing style and the way the visuals were very jumpy and distorted but still matched with the audio and you can definitely see I took on that style when it came to editing my final trailer. I would love to recreate some of this editing this time around, however, I am not as confident that it will work throughout the film, in the nightmare sequence, yes but in the other 3 scenes, probably not. Here is something I wrote in this blog about the AHS title scenes: “I am taking inspiration from the title sequences of the shows, the glitchy movement and disturbing images are really what interested me. Although they don’t tell a story as such, they provide us with the themes and idea of the show, for example the title sequence for AHS: Freak Show (season 4) was based around the circus and the ‘freaks’ and so showed imagery related to that, such as big circus tents and clowns.” I stand by this still, and am sure this will work amazing in my nightmare sequence but probably not the rest.

Now, looking back at my editing blog last year, all 184 words of it, I am honestly shocked that I managed to get a decent trailer out of any of this. This blog is extremely vague and literally only have 2 screenshots. Although, I do mention within the first paragraph of the blog that it was a very simple and “straight forward” editing to create as I was, more than anything else, relying on my use of cutting up my clips and placing them strategically along the audio clip to create something very glitchy and unsettling, and that is exactly what I did. Here is a screenshot from my editing time line last year, this was at the finishing point of my work and already my work this year, only half way complete, is a lot more involved than this.

To finish this blog I wrote: “All in all the editing was quite simple for me, just time consuming as I wanted everything to look the certain way that I had imagined them looking. Apart from what I have just mentioned the only other forms of editing I did were simple things such as adding filters and/or transitions.”

Here is my final project from last year that, surprisingly from the lack of details in my blogs, managed to get to a point where I feel I have improved a lot and feel a lot more confident in my work from researching horror to implementing it into my own work. I am hoping to mimic some of the skills and styles I used throughout this project while also adapting this style to aid the story of my film a little better. Here is the link to this Instagram page with the video on: https://www.instagram.com/p/BjJxVOggT6f/

I went into this thinking that Satanism was a church full of scary people, slaughtering goats and worshipping the devil, this, however, is not the case. Satanists do not believe in the Christian version of satan or that he was ‘banished from heaven’ etc, some don’t believe in Satan as a physical being all together, their religion is more about free will and to get away from the hypocrisy of Christianity. There are many different churches and groups inside Satanism, for example there is the Church of Satan as well as The Satanic Temple; “The Satanic Temple is not a group of devil worshippers but liberal political activists who oppose the increasing influence of the religious right in American politics.” Says VICE in an episode of The Believers on their YouTube channel. They tend to use Satan as more of a metaphor against the ideas and sanctimony of Christianity, I think this may affect my planning quite heavily as I would not want to portray someones religion as something it is not.

Through looking into Satanism and getting to this point of coming to the conclusion that it isn’t what I thought it was, I have decided to focus on the more fictionalised side of satanism. Of course I have read some horrific things about many satanic groups – most of which aren’t true anyway, for example the “baby-eating” cult in London – however, through research I find that their fundamental values and the bases of the religion itself is really not what we see portrayed through thee media and in the horror genre specifically. I will of course still tie in information I have found out through my research and bring in some of the more accurate sides of the religion but I feel I want to use the more fictional and sinister belief of what Satanism is in my work. I already have some ideas of my plot and would like to show an individuals experience with Satan, Satanism and rituals rather than a short film about the religion as a whole, as in my opinion, the actual religion is not what I want to fuel my short film off. I would much rather use the over dramatic and in many cases, simply non-accurate, representation of what many people think Satanism is, and that is much more violent and sinister than the reality of what I have been researching.