First day of editing - 28/1/09

I was actually absent for our Thursday lesson and therefore was not able to join the group for our first session of Editing.
Yet, when I got back and attended the lesson on 2/2/10 it seemed Ashley and Sarah has put a lot of the editing together already. Ashley had decided it would be a good idea to put our piece in black and white to make it look more authentic and spooky, which I definitely agreed with and carried forward with the rest of our work.
Sarah had named all of our clips and deleted the ones she knew we weren't going to want to put in to make sure we didn't get confused. This definitely helped me when I got back as I knew which clip was which and where they were going to go. I then looked through Ashley's work as he had put the beginning scenes together and then looked through Sarah's as she had put the ending together. They both looked great but a few scene's were missing and a few were still in colour so we needed to balance it out and make sure all the scenes were put in the right places.
I didn't really know how to use the editing software as it was my first go with it, but after watching Sarah plow through, I got the hang of it.
We then copied and pasted Ashley's work into Sarah's work to fit them together and complete our piece. It took a while because it seemed that some of the scenes kept going missing and we didn't know why. Yet, after much fiddling around with getting the right scenes in the right places, we had a finished 46 second film.
I then realised I hadn't actually listened to the piece and needed to figure out if there was anything wrong with how it sounded. It turned out that there was. In a few of the scenes you could hear where Sarah was clicking the 'stop recording' button and it really irritated the scene. By editing out the sound from the scene we then had no sound which didn't matter too much to us because we weren't looking for the sound to make the film seem scary, we just wanted the scenes to do that. Some of the scenes, however, did have shuffling noises that made it seem slightly unprofessional, but we've learnt from that and know that we should probably put sound in it to cover that. Also there was a bit of Ashley speaking in one of the scenes so we had to edit that out by making the scene a bit shorter.

In the end we put our file onto AVI and saved it to our servers to make sure we didn't lose anything we had done. By doing this we then copied the URL from the video onto Sarah's Youtube account.
I am pretty proud of what we have done because I think we put in a bit more effort and attention to detail than we had to and actually went a bit further out than others. We probably could've put some sound over the film to make it a bit darker and to leave the ambient sound out, but it didn't matter too much.
We also forgot to change our settings to widescreen filming and therefore our Youtube video is a lot smaller on the screen than what we had planned. But we have learnt from all this and I hope to make it better in the real thing.