Editing Hour 1
In this first hour, we began by importing the clips that we had into Final Cut Pro. As we had filmed a great variety of clips (and admittedly more than was needed) this took quite a long time and so when it came to the initial placing of clips in the timeline, we began with the first establishing shots, showing the characters and location. When knew from a research on the conventions of the action genre that we wanted to achieve a relatively fast and tension building editing pace and so this became the driving force behind many of our decisions. In total, we used roughly 4 separate shots to achieve the opening sequence before our main character even enters the building, and split these up to produce the quick editing pace. We also began to think about match-ona-action and, in particular, continuity as we had to match the footstep shots to the point of view shots in the sense of location and timing. As we had not yet filmed some of the protagonists dialogue at this point, we continued to add some of the antagonists lines of dialogue, placing markers at key narrative points for shots we would add later.
Editing Hour 2
At this point, we decided to place most of the clips that we had on our timeline in order to see what we had and what we needed. It became evident when we did this that, along with needing to film dialogue, we also needed several other small scenes to improve the flow of the sequence and continuity. This also got us to consider the best way for us to set out the clips to convey the narrative in an interesting way whilst also presenting the action genre effectively. Also, this second hour gave our group a greater chance to familiarise ourselves with the different tools used on final cut pro and began linking up singular scenes, such as the flasback sequence, to which we added effects to distuinguish it from present day events in our piece.
Editing Hours 3-6
We spent a greater length of time editing here to perfect and refine what scenes we had already began to edit. In particular, we added very effective music to the start of the sequence. Interestingly, to increase it's effectiveness, we matched the main protaganists footsteps to the beats of the music, which drew more attention to them and created more of an atmosphere. Along with this, we added some transitional effects to a number of the video clips, such as a fade from black to the establishing shot and an over exposed falsh to the start of the flashback sequence.
It was after this fact that we realised that, upon capturing our footage from tape, the opening few seconds of several of our clips had been excluded and therefore we could not use them. This meant that we had to maually find the clips that needed to be recaptured and try it again before we once again had all the clips we needed.
Making a list of the shots that we needed and any others that we might think of at the time, we then went to refilm what we needed.
Editing Hours 7-8
After finally reimporting all of our clips, our first priority was to fill in the gaps we had left in the narrative. And so we added in both characters remaining dialogue and the filling in shots, such as the images of the clock and our antaganists introduction. We then worked on getting the pacing right, paying particular attention to areas where conventions of our genre would be most evident. For example, in some slower scenes, we added more cuts between various shots to up the pace. One of our final tasks was getting to grips with how to use audio in Final Cut Pro; this meant editing some we had and imposting some we didn't. After a long while of looking at audio effects, we managed to edit the voice over section from the boss enough for it to appear as we wanted. We then hunted around for the right music tracks for the flashback sequence and to build tension in the final confrontation between the two main characters. Inserting this turned out to be relatively simple and we added some fading effects such as Chroma Key on other sounds.
