Editing process

We're now moving to the editing process. In my opinion, this is the hardest part in the whole process. We have all the scene but gathering them and putting them together are eventually harder than shooting them. We face several problems during editing that really annoyed us For example, there were scenes that we needed to have in onder to serve the previous ones however we did not have so we had to change or cut that part. However, overall, from what we have so far, I think that our editing process is going very well and we're on sound now.


Tutorial of Final Cut Pro First part

We used Final Cut Pro and Soundtrack Pro on the MACS for our editing process. We have already used Final Cut Pro once so we had nothing to worry about i.e. scratching before actually start editing. We selected several shots that can be gathered together. Mainly, we have all the basic shots such as: long shot, mid shot, close up, over shoulder, point of view. To help us edit easier, we separately log the scenes in several bins such as: 1 bin for the scene in the old dining hall, 1 bin for the scene in the wood and 1 bin for sountrack and sound eddfect. By doing this, we won't be mess up between those shots and save us lots of time.

In the contunuity editing of the opening sequence, we start with a long overall shot of the scene, which is known as the establishing shot. This shot introduces the audiences where the main character is by the presentation of objects. Audiences can recognise that the girl has been kidnapped (her hands being tightened by ropes) and they can understand that she's in a very bad situation (mud all over her body) and they can learn many other information being given from the presentation of location, objects and character. Continuity, we put the scene had been logged into places to finish the story of our product.

For graphic relations between shots, usually we choose two shots which have similar movement of the character i.e. head grabbing from distant cut to close up of the hand grabbing the girl's head or a high angle shot of the doctor about to mark on the girl's neck cut to the clos eup of the movement downwards of the pen on the girl's neck. Also, we did put two shots together as they're opposite to each other. For example, the flashback of the girl. We have a close up shot of the girl wakes up. It was totally silent however we then cut in the scene where she was chased by the psycho doctor which was very fast in duration compared to the waking up scene and it was very noisy compared to the silence in the previous scene as well. These jumping scenes will therefore create nervous and lost feeling for the audience as they have to keep feeling from silence to noisy and back to silence and from dark to bright and back to dark again.

We basically divided our opening sequence in two parts which completely had different contrast in duration, in otherword, contrast in rhythmic relations. We deliberately put a long duration in the scenes where the girl was sleeping, the doctor went in the room to prepare, head grabbing, neck marking. However, as we approach the killing scene and the chasing sequence of the flashback, we rapidly increase the speed of the scene i.e. the flashback of the girl was quite fast and the stabbling on her was really fast. The sudden increase in speed of the scenes creates an effect that brings the audiences more attention to the audiences as they were thinking the girl wouldn't be killed so suddenly.

For temporal relations, we do have flashback of the girls after she has seen the doctor. As the beginging of the opening sequence, the audiences cannot assume how the doctor was. Is he good or bad? By the time the girl wakes up, when she sees the doctor, immediately we cut to flashback. This brings the girl and the audience together as they will understand more about the situation of the girl, of how she becomes so bad and of how she's so scared.

For sound editing, we use Soundtrack Pro and internal resource (from the school's iTunes) to create sound effect.

Because we have no dialouge in our opening sequence, the main sound for it will be ambient sound and diagetic/non-diagetic sound. We have had the "beep" of the heart monitor and the "long beep" of it when the girl dies. Also, we put the sound of low pitch wind throughout the whole piece in a very low volume to create the suspense of the scene and as the scene moves towards the end, the sound gets louder and the "beep" gets faster and faster to create the feeling of death is coming.