Thrillerwork -Editing Evaluation - Sound and Comic

The most important thing in our thriller was the humour. So we just added a lot of cut always or kept shots just because there were incredibly funny. This collapsed a bit with our plans of cutting the length of the film down. However the humour had priority and that's why our thriller is 3 min long and not just 2:30

 

 

After we finished the picture cut. We had to clean the whole thriller up doing a sound cut. We firstly edited the sound so it would make the cuts and thriller look fluent. However as we wanted to present our thriller as being an amateur production we didn't work a vast accuracy. So for an example the sound pitch of the victim's screaming changes from one shot to the other. This represented the idea of the killer having to change the position of the tripod and the camera to continue his show and in that break the victim's scream pitch changed. 

We also added some sinister, non diegetic background music  to create a serious and thriller like atmosphere.

 



Thrillerwork - Editing Evaluation - Getting Everything Into The Right Order and Start of Cutting it Down

When we had finished organizing and discarding the different shots, we started to put all of the shots we wanted to use into the right order with messy cuts. We quickly started to realize that our opening sequence would be much much longer than the 2-3 min it was supposed to be, if we used everything we wanted to use.  Therefore we made the decision to firstly continue putting everything into the right order and then have a length of about 5 min. However it was supposed to have a length of 2-3 min. So we made the decision to firstly continue putting everything into the right order. Then we would go over this rough picture cut again and again slowly cleaning it up and cutting it shorter.
Because we wanted to present our thriller as being a cooking show we had made a lot of close-ups of meat and veggies being cut into slices, cubes and other pieces. Moreover we had a lot of of footage of our actor just explaining what he was going to do. So we simply separated the audio track of the 'explaining' shots from its video track and deleted the latter. Then we used the Final Cut Pro 'Blade' to cut out the speech we didn't want to use or thought is not that important and used it as a voice over putting over the food close-ups.

We used a lot match-on-action to create a fluent image in these cutaway sequences. Moreover it gave the impression of more than one camera being used to emphasize the killer wanting to make his show looking professional.

 Quite a lot of times  we wanted to have the killer on screen while he was talking. However sometimes our actor messed up the lines between two good part in the same shot or  there was a part of the speech we didn't want to use between two parts we wanted to use. We used quite a similar method we used for the voice.

We first simply cut the part of the speech out we didn't want to use. That left use with a very messy jump-cut. To get rid of this ugly thing we inserted a cut-away either showing food or showing the killer. Fitting the short cutaway in so it overlapped a bit of the killers screen time avoided to create a sound gap between the two speech parts. That made the cut look fluent.

Through this quite time taking process we managed to get rid of a minute and a half. However we were still left with 3 minutes and 30 seconds and we had to cut at least 30 seconds.

Because this process had a huge influence on our we talked about what we were going to do first in a group. However we mostly did the practical editing by ourselves as it was a job you need to do with definite decisions. I did a lot of the practical work in this part of the editing process. Because I'm the perfectionist in our group I did a lot of the cleaning up. That's also a reason why our group worked quite well together. We supplemented each other. While one member just left an a bit unclean cut, I cleaned it up. When I was throwing out shots to fast with the purpose to get rid of the length, somebody else stopped so I wouldn't threw out parts we actually wanted to keep once. And another member was always kind of working against us and the shortening process throwing shots in, that created humor. So we wouldn't get rid of all the funny stuff, which are quintessence of our thriller.

Thrillerwork - Editing Evaluation - Organisation and Discarding the Shots

We used the editing software 'Final Cut Pro'

When we began editing our thriller we firstly started to organize our 114 shots into different folders. We didn't have many problems with that, because we shot our thriller chronologically and the shots were numbered in the order we shot them. However, because of the high number of different shots it was still difficult to divide them into different folders still being in the right row. Furthermore the system had to be clear so that we all understood it. 

After we had done that we watched all the shots and labeled those, which we thought might be suitable, orange and those, we thought are perfect, red. The process of choosing the shots we wanted to use and discarding those, we didn't want to use, was actually pretty simple. Because we wanted to present our cooking show as a self-made cooking, where the cannibal sets up the camera, presses 'record' and then starts to 'perform' his show, we couldn't use any shots we the camera was moving. So we cut out all the shots were the camera was moving during the action while the cannibal was on screen. Moreover the whole thriller totally depends on the actor's performance, so we unlabeled all the shots, where our lead actor messed up his lines or didn't perform in the high level of energy we wanted him to perform. However, because we often just kept the camera rolling and let him start again. So sometimes on shot contained one quickly messed up performance and one very good performance. We labeled those either orange or red depending on how much we liked the performance.

My role in these two steps was important, because I organized all the shots and then had to explain to my group members how everything was divided. While the organization was more a solo-work, the (un)labeling and discarding of the shots was a complete team task, because we had to decide as a group what shots we wanted to use. Although we most often agreed with each other, sometimes we had discussion about using shots or not, but we simply solved them through labeling both shots as orange for good and tried out both of them later.