The first montage of shots of a victim being dressed is meant to be an introduction to the film. Since it is not directly involved with the series of events, we wanted to make the shots appear unique. The beginning montage is eerie through the pristine, still, and doll-like presentation of one of the victims. In order to emphasize this, I chose to use lighting effects through editing to make all of the montage shots have a yellow glow to them in order to great an unrealistic and ironically pleasant appearance. By manipulating the lighting, I was able to make all of the shots of the montage look similar in order to portray that they are in the same environment and have the same lighting effects, which was not the case before. Now the shots look cohesive and have the warm yet distant appearance to them that is almost sickly sweet.
0 Comments
In the mad dash to reduce some of the time in our film, I was able to shorten the kitchen scene. This kitchen scene, prior to editing, was worthless because it included our main character with his beard. However the shot now only cuts to a time frame where he has his back to the audience hiding the beard. Anyways, so with this, I created a beautiful transition between modern time and a flashback. As the killer goes downstairs in the house, the shot changes to when the killer walks around the car to get one of the victims. When the killer opens the car door, it is obvious that a victim is inside the trunk. Instead of showing the killer carry the victim away, the shot flashes forward to the killer in the kitchen removing eggs from the refrigerator. The motion of the car door and the motion of the refrigerator door are similar, allowing the concept of the victim being removed from the car to be implied and the transitions of the flashback to be flawless. After meeting with our director and getting input from the other members of our team, I was able to put the shots in the correct order and include the specific details that enhanced the narration. For one of the shots the killer closes the door in order to walk outside. By closing the door, it draws a connection between the indoor shots and the exterior. Currently the shots are all edited except for the sound and the appropriate transitions. When we watched the rough draft of our film, I noticed that the length of the shots in certain locations were too long. I originally wanted longer shots to create a slow, calm, and apathetic mood that corresponds with our film, but some shots are just too much. After calculating how much time we have of our film, I noticed that we are thirty seconds over time. Perfect! So I slimmed down our film to have quicker shots while still maintaining the looming mood of the film. For the montage shots, I made them one second instead of two and I eliminated some unnecessarily long shots that brought no extra meaning to the film. I am happy with the accomplishments, but we still need to get rid of 8 seconds.
All of the night scenes are now on the timeline. Not well organized, but on the timeline. I was able to create a general trend on how the shots are supposed to be included in the film, but since I was working alone I didn't have the choices that the team made and the shot list is now outdated for reflection on that. When the killer is chasing Alec, however, I made the shots quicker and quicker in order to bring up the tension and anticipation in the film. One of the difficulties in the editing was that in many of the shots, Alec was smiling. So I had to mess with the speed of the shots and choose specific clips in order to limit the smiling. It was impossible. However, the smiling of the escaping character does make sense, but is shows that he is possibly unaware of him being chased by a killer. When in doubt, its art.
|