I spent this week in the Avid suite, which I had previously booked out before easter, accompanied by Laura and Mollie to check up on what was going on and offer advice for the edit. I took the rough edit in to begin developing it into the final version. 

The girls in the editing room!

The Edit

Me and Laura discussed how we could cut the rough edit, which was over 7 minutes, down to a more appropriate feeling duration, while maintaining the best continuity that we could. I found this hard at times because there were some really nice shots that had to be sacrificed because they didn't fit very well or because we didn't feel they were necessary. However by the end of shortening we were all a lot happier with the result. 

It was at this point I began properly developing Phase 1's section, as before in the rough edit it had been more of an experiment to see what worked and what didn't. We all finally decided simple, quick cuts were the best way forward, rather than a mixture of overlaying and flipping of the clips, alongside the fast cuts, as this was a bit too confusing. So with the section of quick fades in the rough edit as inspiration I set out to cut up the clips of phase 1 with the aim to make the pace get faster as it progressed. This became very difficult, as the smaller the clip became, the harder it was to manipulate and move around / fit into place. Making changes was also very hard to re-arrange, but with a lot of time, (frustration!) and careful precision it was achievable. At the very end of the 13 seconds of phase 1, I was working with clips only 1 frame long which was interesting! The idea behind this was to make the pace of the clips reflect the chaotic and frantic beginning of the poem / film where they fall into the water and are lost from each other. The fast pace will not only be shown in the editing however, but also with a sound piece made by Katherine to accompany this section - a high pitched sound that gets higher as the cuts get faster until everything abruptly stops. Phase 1 was edited in another sequence to keep things less complicated and then transported into the final edit. Here is Phase 1's sequence before the transportation to see how small things were!

Phase 1's timeline

Colour Correction

Once everything was in place we began colour correction. The aim was to get rid of the reds and pinks in the skin, and make the background dark and also so that the colour correction would blend in with the future masking.  This was a lot harder than originally planned and I had to spend a few more days on this at home as it was hard to get a good mixture of being dark, maintaining quality and getting what we wanted from it. After a lot of edits and re-edits of colour here are some examples from the final look :  

Sound

Once Katherine had finished her sound piece, she gave it over to me and I placed it in the appropriate area of the timeline, matching it up to what was happening on screen. I then took the soundtrack by our composer, and spliced this in, making it fade between various parts to fit the movement better. 

Here is what the timeline looked like by the end :