In today's lesson, we decided to spend the 2 hours editing our footage. Last lesson, we were able to complete the short flash back sequence successfully, so we tried to continue on as far as we could in the song (we didn't think we were going to get to the first chorus though).
What we edited.
Firstly, we went through the footage briefly with the razor tool trying to cut out any footage that we knew that we wasn't going to be using. We did not do this specifically, as we didn't want to cut things out which we may find we needed at a later stage. So, we decided to try and start fitting the lyric images to the song. We dragged the song onto the audio line and then found the first shot we needed (which was the extreme close up of Charlotte's mouth). Once we found this, we cut it down with the razor and dragged it to the beginning of the time-line where the music first started. We were actually able to line it up quite quickly, and to our luck we found that the lip-synch looked perfect.
For the next bit of the song, we wanted a nature shot. During filming, Sophie had suggested a spinning technique for a shot. She took the camera free hand, and recorded it whilst spinning round, to get the trees as the main image. This worked perfectly, and we decided that this was good to use for the beginning bit of the song to set the scene of where we were. We added it in with the razor tool. Then, we had a close up shot of Charlotte singing the second introductory line, so we decided to use it. We felt that it made sense using this shot because it was her lips that featured in the extreme close up, so it linked the two shots to make more sense. Again, this was easy to time. We then cut another section, which ironically was just footage of us walking where we hadn't turned the camera off. The shot worked well because it had a similiar 'nature' feel to the tree shot, so again the two shots had a link.
Following this, we then cut Charlottes verse. We decided that although this verse is going to feature other singers in it at various points, today we were only going to fit her bit in and then add it later once the initial footage is in place. We examined two different filmings of the verse, and decided to use the second one as the camera was more steady and when matched with the song the lip synching was much better. After this shot we then cut a piece of footage of me singing my first line; we had this from two different angles which we then combined together by finely cutting it down with the razor tool. Initially, we had a problem with continuity, whereby in the first shot when I am looking at the camera my eyes were open and then when we cut it to the second shot my eyes were suddenly closed. This looked like a very obvious problem, so we overcome it by shortening the length of the second shot and lengtehning the first one. This meant that the part with my eyes closed was cut out, and it fit much more nicely.
Effects we used when Editing:
Speed Reduction
We used speed reduction in the first nature scene, we did this because we felt the pace of the spinning was too fast for the song. To achieve this, we right clicked on the block of footage to open the drop down menu. From here, we clicked on the Speed/Duration option and this opened a seperate box. We then changed the Speed from 100% to 50%. We found that this helped keep the tone of the song.
Reverse Play
We used reverse play quite subtly in the second nature shot. Just by looking at it, you could think that we just filmed it walking backwards. We did this because we found that it showed us backing away from the distant figure sitting on the grass (Sophie) and then turning away from her. This looks effective as it looks almost like a point-of-view shot. Again we did this by right clicking and going onto Speed/Duration. To achieve the look we simply ticked the 'reverse play' box.
Cross Dissolve
We used cross disolve to soften the transition bewteen a few shots. We felt that the transition from the nature scene to Charlotte's opening verse was a little blunt, so we wanted an effect that made it more smooth. It has a nice effect because the scenery of both shots blend in really nice, and it makes an interesting transition shot. We achieved this by clicking Shot Transitions under the effects section, and dragging 'Cross Dissolve' onto the editing block.
Dip-to-Black
We wanted to use dip-to-black as another way to smooth transition (without re-using cross dissolve). We positioned it just after Charlotte's 'I miss missing you' close up, it comes in as soon as she has finished singing "you". It has pretty much the same effect but due to the scenery of the two shots we felt that dip-to-black was a better effect than cross dissolve. We achieved this by dragging the 'dip-to-black' effect onto the timeline, and inbetween the two shots. We then altered the length by carefully dragging the sides in to our desired lengths.
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