Final Edit First Draft

Our first edit wasn't as good as I had wanted it to be. We were in a bit of a rush with the sound and therefore it hasn't really given off the effect I wanted it to. I now realise that we need some sound when the girl is walking through the field. Something eery and edgy to make it seem as though she is in a dark and bad place. Hopefully this will make it seem more like a thriller rather than just a girl walking through a field.
I also think that our flashbacks might need to be longer as I asked someone who had watched it what they thought and they felt like they didn't know 100% what was going on and if I had actually asked them what was in the flashbacks, they wouldn't have known.
This isn't a good thing and therefore means we need to either blur the flashbacks to make them stand out a bit more, or make them a bit longer.

Sound lesson.

Rob and Aidan have been looking for sound to go over our flashbacks for a while now and he finally came up with a good beat after his brother showed him how to mix it.
Once we had all listened to it and given our approval, we dove into putting the backing track to the flash backs.
We wanted to make sure that it sounded as though the music was coming from downstairs at the 'house party' and therefore wanted it to be slightly quiet and muffled.
There is one part of the music that Rob thought would be good to put behind the rape scene as it has a gunshot in it, so did.
Seeing as our deadline was the Friday we needed to make sure we had the sound in that was completely necessary, being the sound of the bass music on the flashbacks.
Once this was done we only now needed the titles.
We had already decided that Rob would be producer because he was pretty much in control of the editing, we just all put in our ideas and told him what we preferred to what we didn't and he knew how to work the programme. We also decided that I would be director because when on set I was in control of how everything was done and which shots needed to be taken and where about they needed to be. We decided that Aidan would be a co-producer seeing as he had been pretty close with Rob in the editing stages. And we finally chose Sarah to be our manager or research and planning seeing as she wrote up all of the storyboards and also did the shots list. Yet, we may change that to her being the manager of Screenplay.
The name of our production 'company' came from all of our first letters of first names. This then spelt out 'CARS' and this is therefore where our first title name came from. Putting 'Fast' in front of it just made it have a slightly better ring to it.
I also asked Rob if he could bring in the production title as though a car was coming onto the screen and then stopping. Everyone agreed with this idea and then Rob decided he wanted three racing stripes which then fade to make it relevant to our 'FAST CARS' title.
I then suggested that we have the same type of movement within our named titles to make it look as though our titles were also moving. Rob liked the idea of rolling titles but it seemed to me as though they were a bit too 'credit-like' and therefore having them 'crawl' to the left or right in sequence made them look a bit different to anything else. We chose a white colour font and capitals with the same font as in the production title to make it continuous and stand out from the scenes they would be on top of.

Sound lesson.

In our Thursday lesson we decided to move onto sound.
But seeing as we cant all do this and only had two headphones, Rob and Aidan look ed through some Youtube clips as Sarah and I looked through the examining criteria for our blogs.
By highlighting it I could see where I was going wrong and the fact that we had missed out our risk assessment and will have to go back and do it again.

Second lesson of final piece editing.

Our second lesson of editing went quite well. Seeing as we had all of our filming now done, we could put all of our cuts and edits in to make it just how we wanted it.
We all sat round the computer, and seeing as Rob knows how to actually use the programme it was easier for him to just press the buttons as we all put in our opinions.
We knew that we wanted our flashbacks to be sudden and shocking and therefore needed to make sure that our dissolves and switches to the flashbacks portrayed this. We first tried dissolves and dips to black, but none of us really thought it was enough to get across the idea that the character was just thinking back to the night in hand and realising how bad it was as it all came back to her.
We then found a dip to white and thought that was better than the black as it gave more of a shocking effect. After putting these in where we wanted as Ellie walked through the fields and then thought of the night before, I didn't think it was a good idea for us to have the flashbacks and the real-time the same colour. So, instead I wanted it sort of a dark blue to make it murky and as though it stood out. Yet Rob told me we couldn't do that so we settled with black and white which made it stand out anyway.
After the lesson we still had a bit to do but were pleased with how far we got and just need to decide on a few more edits as to where they will go and also choose sound for the backing of the flashbacks.

Sunday final filming.

Today was the day in which we were to finish off our filming.
Because we decided that we didn't want to do all the filming in one day, we started again on the sunday night, also as we needed to make sure that no light was coming through the curtains to enable it to look as though it was a night time house party. We asked Jake Frost to be our rapist, and therefore had the whole cast at my house.

Before the rest of the cast/crew actually got to my house and it was only me, Elle (main actress) and Sarah and so we decided to do the first scene on our own. This was the scene of Ellie actually gagging in the sink and then taking a swig of her wine.
The rest of the crew/cast then turned up and we got on with the rest of the filming that we needed to do. We started with a shot of Ellie's feet and her holding her bottle of wine across the edge of the bed and then Jake's (our actor) feet moving in closer to Ellie's feet. We had to do this a couple of times to make absolutely sure that we had the right walk and got the right amount of footwork in the scene.
The next shot was going to be the one in which Ellie gets pushed onto the bed in a harsh way and then starts to scramble away as if she knows what is going to happen to her. This again took a few shots because most of the pushes weren't hard enough and we really needed to get the perfect shot.
The third shot was the one in which the rapist gets on top of the victim, Jake didn't really grasp how he had to do it properly the first time, but after a few shots we got what we needed.
Jake then needed to pull Ellie back to him and smother her with a pillow to get the effect of him trying to 'shut her up' this again took a few shots because we wanted it to be as harsh as possible to give a nasty effect. In the end we got it exactly how we wanted it, Ellie really struggling and Jake putting in a lot of force.
We then needed a shot of Ellie's tights being ripped because we had already shot her walking home in the morning and her tights are ripped all over, meaning there needed to be a reason for it. The tights were quite hard to rip and I had to do it with a key in the first place, so it made a bit difficult for Jake to rip them, but in the end we got there.
We then needed Ellie to take her tights off because we realised that rape wouldn't be able to occur if tights were on. So she took them off and Sarah hung them on a nearby stand to ensure that they were still seen by the audience in the next shot.
This shot was of Ellie then just lying on the bed, distraught and alone, whilst then panning towards Jake doing his trousers up and walking off scene. This only needed one shot as everyone said my pan was okay.
We then wanted a shot of Jake walking out of the door from one angle, behind him, and then another angle from Ellie's point of view lying on the bed, shot by Sarah.

In the end I was pretty happy with the work we did and am happy that we got a few more different shots than we did in our first day of shooting.

First lesson of final piece editing.

Seeing as we haven't actually filmed our entire piece yet, we didn't really know how much editing there was for us to do.
So we decided to capture what we had done off our tape anyway and therefore would be able to look at our work in detail to make sure that we had the right shots for the whole piece in the end and also to see where about we either wanted the 'flashbacks' to go and how they would fit in.
We knew that it wasn't going to take all four of us to do this so Aidan and Sarah decided to go back to Chilwell fields with the camera and shoot some shots of the fields on their own to maybe fit in a few fast edits of trees and an empty field to really portray the loneliness of the surroundings the girl will walk through.
This didn't go too well as it was a very bright day and there was a lot of gleam on the shots as well as it not being very continuous on from out 6am dark morning in the rest of the film. We still haven't decided whether or not to use these shots but when we come to capturing it may edit them to be a bit darker and then see how they fit in.
This then left Rob and myself to start the editing. We had a major problem with actually starting the software for about the first hour of the lesson and therefore just had to wait for it to load and had to try it on three different computers to actually get it to work. When we eventually got there, Sarah and Aidan had come back from their filming and decided to join in.
We realised that there were a few errors as in one of the shots you could see me, and other shots we had left a few seconds before our actress actually started in case of bad timing. This then meant we had to edit down the first second of a few shots and also had to cut out the actresses head in one shot of the close up of the houses to make sure that the audience couldn't see that she had actually stopped.
This all worked out well and now we just need to do some more filming and put together our whole piece.