Portrait of a place editing

Firstly we re-named all of our clips as we thought this would be easier when it came down to which clips we were going to use and the order that they would be going onto our project. After we did this, we place the first clip at the train platform and cit it down to where we both though looked the best, followed by the rest of our clips, at first doing a rough edit to see what we were like for time. When we put all of the clips into place, we ended up with the project coming to about 4 and a half minutes. After this we knew that we had to be critical when cutting our shots and which were completely necessary. We went back through our clips and refined each one, even taking tiny bits from the beginning and end of the clips to try and save some time. One of the thins we wanted to try and show was the passing of time and the lack of self belied in the character, so by cutting some of the walking shots in half and using transitions, we were able to give the impression of the character walking without showing the whole action. I think this was successful in both our narrative and in saving some time in the project. We then decided which cuts needed to have transitions between them. We also didn't want to make it too unrealistic by adding lots of transitions to the film so the sequence where the character is walking up the country lane, we decided not to put transitions into. I personally think that this was the best decision because then the pace is kept plus it gives a good varied switch between camera angles. We managed to cut it down to 3 and a half minutes in time for the rough edit with Dom. When we watched the exported version, the transitions didn't work properly and made the film jump and change colours.

During our tutorial, Dom watched our film and told us exactly what the problem was with our transitions and gave us tips and pointers to make it better as well as cut down on time. Because we used Sam's Canon 550D and it records in HD, we didn't realise that this footage wouldn't work correctly in Final Cut Pro and this was the problem we were encountering. To solve this, Dom told us to transcode the footage in Pro Res but this meant re-uploading the footage and cutting it again. One of the other things he told us to do to save time and to make the pacing better was to cut out scenes where we cut the action away from the character walking at one angle and back again to the previous place.

As neither me or Sam had used the program before, we searched a tutorial in google and followed it until we were able to transcode all of our footage. Although this took a while to do, we waited it out at the cutting process was easy to do as we layered the main clip over the old clips to get it accurate cuts we wanted. We also took this opportunity to cut some of the time away, and as Dom said, by removing the going back to scenes, the film flowed better and the pace was quicker. We purposely left the longer scenes at the end of the film, to show a gradual slow down in pace which led to the final sequence of the character leaving the letter in the bark of the tree.