Thursday 18 June 2009

dr livingstone: your edit, i presume?


What a strange, lucky day yesterday was. My passport that went missing when our lovably idiotic post room workers sent it second class instead of special delivery turned up at the embassy, EMAP is generously sponsoring the salon[london] event I'm running in August, my 2nd year viva went off without a hitch, and I started the edit on my film class short film. All in a day's work, you know.

Though it took me the better part of two hours to edit two minutes of film (a very rough edit, I should add), I didn't mind at all. It's such an engaging process, though a bit of a nightmare for anyone with even the smallest designs on perfectionism. I thought that we didn't shoot enough takes during our weekend shoot, though I see now that we probably shot too many. I also suppose that this is where storyboarding becomes worth its weight in gold. I always thought that storyboarding was a bit airy-fairy and couldn't really see the point, but I realise now that it's the equivalent of creating a very detailed outline before writing an essay. It makes it much easier to go through all the kazillions of takes to find exactly the shot you're looking for in the edit. If you know you want a close up on a certain character's face while that character is saying certain lines, you can get through your edit a lot faster than if you haven't got a clue what shot you want and where you want it.

It also transpires that Final Cut Pro is a lot easier to use than I thought it was. I don't know why I couldn't figure it out before. I'm sure there are lots of interesting effects and shortcuts which will make editing more fun in the future that I still haven't learned, but I've got the most essential skills which means I can at least get a half decent edit thrown together. It's all so exciting. I love learning new stuff! So we'll be finishing off our edits in a few weeks time and then we're having a screening (how very quaint) for our last class, where we'll watch all the different edits. It'll be like watching ten different, yet all very bad, short film versions of Holby City. Probably funnier though as you'd be surprised how hilarious bad editing can be...

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