Film - Editing For Our First Draft

We started editing our footage in the 1st week of December. However when we were trying to upload our footage onto the Mac computers at school we came across a problem. As our footage was filmed on a memory card instead of a tape, the clips were in the wrong format and could not be imported onto the computers. We tried to load our footage onto a PC and then put it on a memory stick so we could transfer it back to the Macs but the clips still wouldn't import. Our Media teacher saved us by taking our memory card and converting all the files individually to make them compatible with the Macs. The next day we were able to import all our clips onto i-Movie and we began to edit.

We had around 200 clips of footage to edit and we didn't really know where to start. We decided to make 3 different folders in which we could cut and paste the most appropriate footage into each one. One folder was for all the good clips that we wanted to use for our film. Another folder was for our out-take. We would put the out-takes at the end of our first edit just for a bit of fun. The final folder was just all the left over footage. It was important to keep all the footage as later on we may want to add tiny parts that we didn't think we needed originally.

We started to edit our folder with our good clips in. Editing is such a long process and we all had to be so careful as we didn't want to accidentally delete any footage that we needed. We all had a go using the computer and as a group we all decided what clips needed to be used and what needed to be deleted. Once we had only the good clips that we were going to use for our first edit we had to cut and paste the clips in the correct order. This was hard and we were quite undecided as to how the film should run. This took quite and lot of time and a lot of messing around just to see which order looked the best.

Once everything was in order we had to add effects over the flashback scene to make it look like it was in the past. We chose to make it a black and white effect, and added the effect to each of the clips from the flashback. After adding the effect we had to put in black fade in clips to show that the flashback is in a completely different time to the rest of the film. We also had to add another black fade in before the funeral scene started, again this was to show that the funeral was at a different time to the other scenes.

The final thing we needed to do to complete our rough edit was to add a soundtrack into the film. We all agreed that we wanted ADELE hometown glory and the high contrast remix of hometown glory on our film. as we didn't have the files for these two songs on a memory stick we used a you tube conversion website, which allowed us to put the music into i-Movie.