Editing Techniques

Editing Techniques 

- Continuity Editing - The sequencing of shots to imply or suggest an order of events to help tell a story by including important events that can help the audience to come to a conclusion about what events occurred without necessarily having to have seen all of them take place. 

- Accelerating Time - Production time can be condensed to show a sequence of events in a much shorter time than they would take in real life. This can be used to leave some things to the audiences imagination by cutting out irrelevant clips and shots and also shortening shots to let the audience know that they happened without having to watch the entire process.

- Expanding Time - Time can be stretched and dragged out for longer than the actual time represented in the scene. This can be used to create suspense leading up to an event. For example, time can be slowed during the build-up to an explosion to create suspense.

-  Cause, Effect and Motivation - This relates to continuity editing as this technique is used to suggest and explain why things happen. This means that the causes of events need to be shown for them to make sense to the audience. For example, we usually wouldn't see somebody pick up a phone and start a conversation without seeing or hearing it ringing in that scene. Motivation is used to show or imply to the audience why a character did something or why an event occurred, this is useful in the Crime genre as the criminals' side of the story can be shown to the audience to build character development. (This includes base motives such as money, revenge, jealousy and suspicion etc.)

- Insert Shot -  A close up shot of anything (an object or person) in the basic scene, usually in an establishing or wide shot. This is used to provide further detail about any aspect of a shot, this could be what a character is holding or wearing, a particular building in a city, item on a table, car in a traffic jam etc.

- Cutaways - Cut away from the main scene to provide additional information to the audience. An example of this may be an establishing shot after an event takes place, to give the information of where the event took place. 

- Relational Editing - Refers to the cause and effect relationships when sequences of shots are tied together and the editing of shots for the purposes of comparison or for the contrast of content.

 - Thematic Editing - a rapid sequence or montage of images to communicate feelings and ideas that relate to a genre rather than telling a story. It is used in music videos, feature films, TV commercials, and promotional productions to create a mood or feeling rather than communicate specific information. 

- Cross-Cutting  / Parallel Editing -  Parallel editing (also known as cross cutting) is the technique of alternating two or more scenes that often happen simultaneously but in different locations. This can be used effectively to show the environment around action scenes and expand time as we as viewers will see more than one event but they all take place at the same time.

Preliminary Task Evaluation

AS Media Studies Preliminary Task

- At a micro, technical level, how well did you observe the conventions of continuity  and the language of editing? 

Our scene involved a Hitman or contract killer and a contractor sitting opposite each other t a table. Before this however, we were able to use match on action when the Hitman enters the scene by coming through a door. We cut from a shot of the Hitman pulling the door open from one side and then cut to another shot of him walking through the door with it closing behind him. We also show it during the scene where the contractor slides the Hitman's next job over to him on the table. This is done by keeping the character's actions in a sequence that made sense to the audience - so we had the Hitman open the contract during a shot instead of doing it between shots.

- What were you pleased with?What seems to work well and why?

- What is the best shot/ angle in your clip 

I was pleased with the variety of shots and angles we used to create this short film, We were able to clearly show match on action, shot reverse shot and the 180 degree rule WITHOUT breaking them by crossing any of the characters' eye-line. I feel that the best shot in the film is the two shot used to show the conversation between the two characters ;it allowed us to capture the expressions of both of them during the exchange and (attempt to) cause tension and suspense between the two of them.

- What mistakes did you make? What would you have done differently? 

- Recorded for a longer time before and after a scene?

Some mistakes that we made included not muting background noise in some shots ; an example of this is in one of our scenes you can hear people shouting and laughing in the background, also, sometimes when playing my character, I spoke too quietly and the camera wasn't able to pick up my voice - causing us to have to re-film the shot. Another mistake that we made was not using the tripod in scenes where we could have, this made some shots look shaky and made them unable to convey the effect we wanted.

-How did you manage the group dynamics and equipment and resources?

-How did you delegate roles? How did the equipment help you?

To manage our resources we had James take care of the camera and Ajani take care of the tripod. I brought in an SD card but we ended up using one provided by the school as I was unable to format it. When delegating the roles we filmed a variety of test shots to experiment who was going to play each character ; in the end, James played the Hitman and I played the Contractor. Then we had Adam and Ajani decide who was going to film the most shots by seeing their ability to use match on action, shot-reverse-shot and follow the 180 degree rule without assistance, so we could rely on them during filming to get the shots we needed without additional direction.

-What problems did you encounter logistically?

- Difficulty with Actors? Camera Issues? Editing Problems?

When gathering the files to use for editing our short film, we noticed that there were way more video files  on the camera than we had recorded and we struggled to separate the files from our own when importing them to Adobe Premiere Pro and editing them. We also had a problem in the fairly early stages of editing when the laptop my group was using froze, leaving us unable to save all of our progress and causing us to have to restart the project. Luckily we still had enough time to finish the project though.