Preliminary Task - Post Production

Once the prelim task had been shot, we were faced with the daunting task of piecing the shots together and making the production look professional. None of us had ever used the editing software before, so we were expecting a challenge; happily, there were current year 13 students on hand to help us out and give us advice. Once we had been shown the basics, the software turned out to be surprisingly user-friendly and we were able to edit our footage together with relative ease.

We did, however, run into some problems. First of the problems was actually with the footage itself. We discovered that two of our shots (the walk down the corridor) did not match up with each other, as I had stopped walking in one before I reached the point where I started walking in the next shot. Since we did not have time to re-shoot it and I was wearing a different shirt on the day when we started editing, we simply cut the first shot out. However, if this had happened in a crucial scene it would have been more problematic. From this, we learned that we should check our shots before we get to the editing suite, and preferably shoot the same scene multiple times.

Another problem which we encountered was that; somewhere along the line when uploading our footage, all of our sound was completely lost. We had to completely re-upload all of our footage again, and even then some of the sound was lost from the opening scene where I am walking down the corridor. We covered this up by putting music over this scene, however we learned the hard way that the year thirteen students had given us some very useful advice – get the shooting done early so that we have plenty of time to sort out any problems with the editing. The computers can often be very stubborn!

The only other notable problem we had was editing the match-on-action shots to perfection. It often took the judgement of two or three people to cut the shot in exactly the right place to create a smooth scene (hence ‘the invisible art’) and even then we didn’t get it completely right every time.

The comments of our class when they saw our Prelim were generally positive – particularly regarding our match-on-action editing when the door is being opened. The class did comment that perhaps we should have had a two-shot of the dialogue before the shot-reverse-shots (this was mysteriously lost on the camera when we uploaded it) and that there were one or two shots which could have been cut in later as there are moments where either me or James are looking blank before the dialogue begins.

Overall, I was extremely pleased with the outcome of our production despite the few problems which we had, and it was very satisfying seeing it all come together in the editing suite.