Account of Editing process

Editing In our editing process we mainly used a piece of software called Final Cut Pro this is a time line based system. We used a lot of special effects such as de saturation of colour, jump cuts, blurs we did this through the programme Adobe after Effects. We used Another media effect called montage, this was heavily influenced by one of Russia’s most prominent filmmakers, Sergie eisenstein, he was essentially the father of montage and our mode of address. We looked at Einstein’s work very closely and used his ideas, he was a huge inspiration to our editing process and how the final video was constructed. We also used a programme called Colour to de saturate the images to either make the darker or lighter. Colour is a programme which allows you to change the appearance for the images, for example you can change the hue and saturation as well as brightness and colour of your video. Using Colour can sometimes be a very length process though because instead of being able to apply settings to the whole video you have to edit it shot by shot. Starting the editing process proved to be rather challenging as I found it slightly confusing, it was difficult to know where to start. The way we started editing was as a group, however we all wanted different things as to how our video would be constructed. We eventually used the most commonly used and easiest technique in editing; we applied the shots to the time line for the whole length of the shot and then placed smaller shots over the top of this. There are other ways to edit most people would have followed their storyboards, we could not do this due to last minute changes to our pop video idea. For our group, it was just a case of experimenting with what worked and what didn’t. After we had finished our draft, we showed it to one of the media teacher’s mat, who gave us advice on how to improve it. Mat helped a lot as it was difficult for us to criticise our own work and we needed his aid to steer us in the right direction, giving us tips on what looks bad and what looks good, I think it is very important to get an external view on your work as sometimes we found it difficult to find the faults. There are two types of editing; you can either use continuity editing or discontinuity. Continuity editing is editing that usually follows a certain pattern or a cuts on the beat. Discontinuity editing is the opposite of this, can often come across as quiet random. For our music video we decided to use discontinuity editing. The reason for this was because representing the song and brand; we wanted to reveal the unstable and discontinuous mind that our star had. When we were editing we used the theorist Negus to help us apply editing conventions. We subverted Negus's conventions of short shots; we also used a wide and extensive use of shot types, camera movements and angels which fitted nicely with our theme.