Editing Techniques Evaluation

Editing is a part of the entire production process that I have always enjoyed. I had previous experience before the course with editing but I learnt a lot of new techniques and overall just grew a bigger appreciation for editing by the end of the course. 

Firstly, I feel one of my biggest weeknesses when it comes to editing is my lack of organisation skills. It is something that until I corrected it, had never realised how much of a longer process unorganisation was making my entire editing and post production time. For example when it comes to clips whether its stock footage/downloaded footage or fottage that I have physically gone out and shot myself, I would always find myself with a load of unnamed clips in my downloaded section of my computer. Sometimes I would put them into a single editing folder but a lot of the time it just made things more confuseing as there was no order and it was full of clips from the entire year. When using premiere pro, I would never use bins to organise my footage and I would instead spend a lot of time browsing through my computer for all my clips as I thought labeling and naming them would be a waste of time. Towards the end of the year ai began to start using bins and renaming clips and it proved to be so much easier and faster when editing footage. It also allowed me to quicky sort out redownloading files when specific footage had been lost or corrupted, rather then not editing for a few days after uploading fottage only to find out after searching for it, it wouldn't import properly. This is something I am really glad I improved on as I find this really useful outside of editing for the course. Therefore, overal i feel like this was the section i improved on the most in editing by far.

Another area I feel that I have improved on in editing is timing. This is more in terms of my shots and using key frames to add beats that sync up to the music. At the start of the year my cuts were okay but now they are alot cleaner and all match up. An example of my cuts not being as tight and clean is in my found fottage 4 hour film challenge as even though the cuts match up woth the sound for the most part they are a few milliseconds out and not as clean as they couldve been. This may have been made harder since I was rushing due to the 4 hour tome frame but also because I was just counting the time in between each beat and then cutting the shots to the beat of the previous beat so they were sometimes slightly off. Since then I have learnt how to get up the sound graph on premiere pro so I can visibly see when each beat of the music hits because there is a peak on the graph and I can add beats and keyframes to those peaks that then show up whenadding footage and then cutting and trimming it to hit on each beat perfectly. You can clearly see this in a peice i did editing a montage of the entrie course for my own amusment. Its just a montage of a load of random clips and photos from over the year to LGBT by cupkae which has some slow pauses but for the most part is a very fast paced, upbeat and chaotic song which was very appropriate for the montage. Due to this the editing had to be on point and hit every beat for it to maintain this high energy, fast paced chaotic vibe and I ended up being very sucessful with this as It was all on point, especially the photos at the beginning. It also took a lot less time because this newfound method is not only effective but I have also had several months practicing it now. So overall I feel as I have improved and made this part of editing a lot easier as I now have a much faster and more efficient way to do it.

Another side of editing I feel that I have improved on is colouring and the enhancment of my footage. I wasn't very farmiliar with colouring clips or altering the contrast, clarity, brightness etc, I only reaaly new how to add filters on to desaturate clips I wanted in black and white. This is very evident in one of my 4 hour film challenges from the beginning of the year called; The Ugly Duckling, whichs style was inspired by an old style black and white silent film and story was inpired by a fairytale, hence the title. Because it was inspired by black and white silent film. All I did was add music and added a black and white preset to the entirety of the short film. The problem with this was that even though on the surface it looked okay and it worked, with a bit of a closer look it was evident that fie to the lighting of some filming locations, the bkack and white sometimes didn't pop and blended where they shouldn't have and made the background look more important then the story being told through the main mise-on-scene on screen. This was also probably the most common critisim I had on this edit when receiving feedback and constructive critisim on this film in particular because in silent, colourless films especially, it is important for everything on screen to be clear and distinctive as your diegectic sound and colours cant tell the story so the shots and mise-en-scene have to do it soley. Since then I have leant how to add on oresets that allows you to edit and adjust the colouring and lighting and saturation of every individual shot which means in clips where the lighting is mabye brighter like the colour of a wall etc it wonr blend in if I adjust the colouring and lighting and therefore, eveything onscreen can be distinctively recognised this can be seen in my 4th July music video as different clips were adjusted to fit the setting and match the other shots. For example there were shots i needed to represent the evening when things are dark but filming shots in the dark is quite challenging as it creates a lot of noise and grain. So instead,shots like the microwave ones, I shot in the day with a lot of the other shots to save time and have better quality and then when editing I made them dark by desaturating and maximising the cintrast and minimising the brightness to make it appear as if it was shot at night in the dark to help the story be conveyed to spectators. Therefore this section of editing is another thing I feel I have massively improved on and is something I use on a regular basis now.

To conclude, when starting the course I felt quite confident in my editing but I soon realised I wasnt anywhere near my best as I found several new methods and ways of editing that make life more efficient and faster for me when editing. So I take pride in the fact I found a lot of criticism and flaws in my editing as I now feel my editing is. A lot better then it was several months ago.