This is going to be quite a long post as I'm going to be talking about the post-production process for both of the projects that I was working on. For the two projects that I was working on for the end of third year, I was more involved with the editing process than I had been on any project I had worked on before.
The obvious challenge with Beaulieu was that it was just the two of us in the edit suite, and we would have to go through the entire process, from logging all of the footage through to delivering the final product by ourselves. Luckily, after a meeting event organised by one of the lecturers, we had met a first year, Natalie Janicka, who was interested in our project and gave us some money as part of crowd funding. She then offered us her help if we wanted, so she was a lot of help with the editing process, as well as helping out on some of the shoots. Between the three of us we managed to work really well to make some difficult decisions.\
Due to the way we had shot the film, we knew that editing was going to throw quite a lot of challenges our way, and like shooting, we had taken the approach of allowing ourselves enough time, but also making sure that we were really utilising every minute that we were going to be in there. Because we were allowing the location to inspire us about certain things to do in the film we had made some decisions during the production process that we would change certain bits. Fortunately for us, because we had no dialogue, or really any solid plot points that needed to happen in a certain order we allowed ourselves the chance to be really creative with the editing.
If you look at the film as it turned out, it’s actually very different to how we had imagined it, but in my opinion it’s actually far better than I imagined it would be, and I’m really proud of the three of us for that. Having logged the footage properly, noting down what was good and bad about each take, we already had a head start with the editing process in a way that we just couldn’t do with the shooting. As soon as we got the footage in, we made a rough assembly based on the story we had originally planned for and taking into account that changes that had decided to make whilst shooting.
After making the rough assembly and decided what we really like and what we didn’t like about the film and then made some changes. As we did this more and more we started to find our attitudes towards certain parts of the film really changing which was interesting. I think it was just us becoming better editors, because of course, considering that we had shot the film ourselves there were certain shots or sequences that we found ourselves becoming really attached to because we were so proud of how we had managed to achieve it during production. But as we watched them more and more we started to lose that attachment and started to watch it more as a viewer, and how it was as a piece of entertainment. This meant us really trimming down some shots, that before we had held for a really long time before cutting to something else.
Also because we didn’t have any dialogue, apart from one line in the last shot of the film, we were able to move clips around from the original order we had them in. The other thing we’d done because we weren’t going to have any dialogue was to pick some music that we really liked that we would be using as the soundtrack for the film. We picked these songs fairly early on in the pre-production process so by the time it came to shooting the film we were really familiar with them and knew what sequences we wanted to use them for. Having this in mind whilst shooting and then taking that into the editing process has allowed us to come up with some really interesting sequences that really compliment that music that they’re with.
Editing for Love in Your Pocket wasn’t such an easy task. There were countless technical issues encountered for this project which ended up setting us back quite a bit, as well as people in the group (including myself) having personal problems that ended having an effect on the group. These problems combined ended up with us having to ask for an extension which we were lucky enough to receive. This allowed us more time to edit the project and I joined the edit after Lawrence and Hannah had compiled a rough assembly, and I’d finished work on Beaulieu.
This project took a lot of work, and was moved around and reshuffled a lot of times before the final cut was made. Again, similarly to Beaulieu, we had filmed the same action from multiple angles, and had filmed each somewhat separate from the others so we ended up having the opportunity to really shuffle it around. The biggest challenge with the edit for this project was getting the film to a point where it felt like a complete package. During the rough assembly Hannah and Lawrence had just put together each scene separately from the other one and hadn’t put the back on the timeline. This meant that when we did get to the point of putting them together there were no real transitions between the scenes, it would just suddenly cut.
It also caused a problem for the voiceover Hannah had been hoping to add, because there just simply wasn’t any screen time to cover the dialogue she would need to record. So this meant having to go back and play around with every scene again. Hannah then wrote her voiceover clips and recorded them, and we added them in, which really brought the film together in a way that wasn’t there early on.
I really learnt a lot about the editing process with the two projects, and combined with the fact that I directed both projects (co-directed with Elliott on Beaulieu) I think it will make me a better director on any future films or programmes I’m lucky enough to be able to direct.
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