Main Task- Editing

My film went through a lot of editing and a lot of changes all that needed great IT kills to get the final product to look as good as possible. Because of our Feedback we found that our editing had to improve a lot and we had to really make use of all of the effects and other options available to us on iMovie HD.

Editing on iMovie

Our production was edited using iMovie and I am now going to talk through the edits we made, why we made them and the skills involved to produce the edits.

First thing I needed to (Alex Jowett, Editor) was to upload all of our clips onto iMovie, this meant connecting the camera to the computer with a firewire cable and opening the iMovie HD application. From this you then simply click upload, and all of the clips that we had shot where then added onto iMovie.

After this had completed I then had to pick out with clips we where going to use, as there where many that had mistakes on them, and many that we had decided on the day of filming not to use. After doing this I then needed to cut the scenes down because on most scenes we had filmed for too long, and there was shots that we did not need. This was also crucial to do as our film added up to 2 Minutes and 32 Seconds, so we defiantly needed to cut 32 seconds.

After doing this I then went through many stages of playing the film and making notes on sound and video FX that I could add into the production so that I was sure of exactly I needed to do.

I then imported the music from a copyright free website that I had found (www.freeplaymusic.com). I had to first download the song, upload it to iTunes and then from iMovie, it picked up the song in iTunes, from which I just had to import this into my production. I had to make sure that it was positioned so that the music would start when the CD Player turns on in the opening scene, to give the effect that the music was diegetic, but then became non-diegetic as he left his room, almost like the song was in his head.

After I had done this I then added more sound effects to help emphasize sounds that I needed the audience to hear. These sounds included footsteps as 'Matt' walks through the woods and heartbeat sounds in the background to help create tension for the audience.

I then added in the second song that was going to be in our production, this song was less up-beat and more depressing and low-beat. I positioned it to the point I wanted it to play, which was wile the character stared into the mirror and had a flashback from school.

I then made the flash back scene black and white. I did this by putting a black and white effect onto of it. The reason for this is so that the audience was aware that it was a flashback and had already happened. That is crucial for them to understand the ending.

Now that my films was fully constructed, all that was left for me to do was the smaller edits that sometimes can make a big difference. I started off by firstly changing all the sound levels so that I could remove unwanted sounds, and put more emphasis on sounds I needed the audience to hear. I also had to adjust the sounds when the music changes so that it was not an instant change but instead a gradual change. I did this by fading out one of the songs wile fading in the other at the same time.

Our establishing shot is our production logo, and this had to be added onto iMovie as an image, and despite looking through many different iMovie tutorial videos I could not find out how you can add an image on top of the moving picture so I assumed that this was not possible on iMovie and decided to add it on as a new clip with only the Production Logo showing.

I made this logo on Photoshop Elements by uploading a picture of a knife off the internet, importing it to Photoshop, then I used a paint tool to create the effect of blood from the knife, then simply added some text that read our production name 'MJ Productions'.

I then finally added on the Title Scenes. I created these in iMovie and set the font to look quite scary and weird, to fit in with the genre, and I also made it red so that it would signify blood. I had to make sure the title scenes where on screen long enough for the audience to read them, so I received Feedback from people who where in the same room as me.