Editing Research

Something that we were aware of from the start is that all of our film shoots would take place during the day, and therefore if we wanted the main scenes at the asylum to take place at night, we would have to edit the footage to make it look like it was filmed at night. This tutorial I found by Surfaced Studio does exactly this, and this step-by-step visual tutorial of Adobe AfterEffects is very easy to follow and very easy to do. 

Now, because I've used the main software I'm using, Adobe Premiere Pro, before, it's fairly simple to just get stuck in with editing. In November, I had to make this one minute video for a show reel in a university application and this allowed me to really get to grips with the software and experiment a little before I jumped in with this short film. 




In terms of following editing conventions in the horror/thriller genre, one thing's for sure is that it ranges from long take shot to short take shots in order to build up suspense through dramatic scenes, and this technique goes along with the research of genre conventions I did earlier in the project. This also coincides with what I found in my analyses of existing short films, so I know for definite that this is something that will be effective. 

Another technique is using jump cuts in places to break up footage and allow the viewer to be slightly on edge at times. As horror/thriller films are supposed to keep the viewer gripped in the suspense, throwing in a few jerky shot transition shows the significance of things in shots and builds suspense by using quick shot transitions and giving the illusion that something scary is about to happen. 




This advert is a little group project I participated in, creating a moving image advert for a local camera shop Clemens Photography. This advert was fun to make, and we got to study the conventions of other camera adverts, as well as independently taking all of our equipment to the shop to make an ad without supervision to see what we could do. This allowed us to experiment with camera angles, shots, and movements, and create a little narrative, i.e. the young man walking to the shop and browsing. The editing involved animating images laid over the footage of the spinning cameras, and this was a interesting skill to learn, using the rotation effects on Premiere Pro. There were some challenges whilst making this, for example the cameras spinning on the platform, for which we used a pottery wheel, and spinning this at a constant speed was difficult, as well as making sure the focus was absolutely perfect so that each camera was in focus at every point of its rotation, but in the end I think we did a great job for an amateur moving image advert.