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.