Post-Production Blog Entry

As the editor for the production I had to cut and add titles to our opening sequence. I was worried because when looking back at the film we had very little footage that would be useful and easy to edit. Most of the recordings were cut too short making it difficult to make each shot flow through and create good continuity throughout the opening sequence. When we finished filming we were confident with the result, but when we looked at it technically and thought how each scene would flow together and create narrative easily through the filming, it became apparent that there was a lot of editing work to do to make the opening sequence satisfactory.

I had to re-arrange the scenes in order for the sequence to look correct and make sure the narrative could follow through well. This meant changing the storyboard for the narrative to work through out the opening sequence. I found this difficult because I was using my own judgment to see what worked or not. This was a new experience for me as I had not done editing before or worked with many editing programs. I started editing on Wednesday 31st April and this is when I got most of the general editing done. I added some fade transitions in between some scenes so that it would help continuity through the film as some of the angles were incorrect this help each scene blend into each other. There are some issues with the rule of thirds aspect. When looking at different scene’s the rule of thirds differ from each scene to scene, this made it difficult for the continuity to flow through easily. For adding the titles, I layered the title over the film clip and faded these at each end so as one title faded out, another title faded in. This made it look simple and professional, the titles were also placed so that they didn't interfere with the action in the scenes.


This is how I added titles over a film clip. When adding a new title, I opened the add new title window, then I had to draw a box over the clip to where I want the text to be positioned in the frame and then simply typed in the title (shown in the picture above). I could also adjust the size and type of font with this program. Once I had completed that I could go back the the general editing page and adjust the opacity of the text (the yellow line). With this tool I made the text fade in and out by dragging the hinges shown in the picture below, so the text would fade in and out over the recorded scene.



I selected a simple font that wouldn’t be too disruptive for the scene and using no capitals made the titles look more simple and subtle. I simply added a new title under the first like it is shown in the picture, I selected a font size of 25 for the general titles but for the main title of the film I used font size 45 so it would make the most impact. Also with the title of the film I made the title go over two scenes making it on screen for a longer time and also having the main title over the panning shot of the beach made the title have more impact to the audience.



We used;

0-00-0.54 seconds of Track 7 (Crimson Joy by Jim Dooley) from 'Directors Cuts - Romance 2'
DCD014

to layer of the atmospheric sound and with the music it made the opening sequence look more complete and better as the music brought everything together and gave the emotion of the product. When layering the music on top I had to adjust the volume of the atmospheric sound because when I re-arranged the clips the sound became broken and didn't fit to the over all sequence. Like changing opacity on the titles it was a similar process to adjust the volume to fade in and out at certain places in the opening sequence.