K.H. - Reflection on Group Editing Session

In order to ensure all work on the editing timeline was ready for the deadline, we decided to perform our the editing on our video in bulk. We were being held back by the limited technology and software available to us at school, Adobe Premier Elements 3.0 could not properly handle the high cutting rate of our footage and the sheer amount of it we had, and as such we suffered crashes, audio issues such frequent stuttering, audio cutting out or not playing at all which was a particular problem. Editing on more up to date software proved of Adobe Premier CS6 was extremely advantageous, as it allowed us to preserve the quality of the footage without having to compress it, and allowed to sync Eleanor's performance with the lyrics far more easily as the sound played smoothly. We spent 6 hours working on the footage at Harry's house in total, and divided the time evenly between us, we each edited in half hour slots and alternated roles, one person would edit, one person would contribute editing ideas, and the third person would read from the shot list and story board and provide time codes. As evidence of this, we filmed the whole thing and put the highlights of discussion and important decisions into a vlog.
There were problems and decisions we made that weren't clear from the vlog such as:

• The solution to the problem of initially establishing different lines of action that I raised in the video was to have text on the screen stating where they chronologically fell within the narrative in the establishing shot. However, we did not have any explanation beyond this to maintain narrative fuzz and encourage repeat viewings.
• Syncing Eleanor's performance to the track could be challenging as it was sometimes unclear from the raw footage which words she singing exactly. The solution to this was surprisingly simple and involved either using the footage with sound so we could sync the audio of the song being played on set with the track on the timeline, and listening to both in tandem until they matched, or finding a defined point in the footage where Eleanor is obviously singing a particular word, and using that to line up with the precise moment of the song where she is singing that word.
• We did some colour work with curves to differentiate the lines of action, for example in action line 1, the performance, we raised the levels of blue add some colour to fog and to compliment the lights in a way that made them look more glamorous, in action line 2, in the morning, we increased the brightness levels in the early part of the action line so that the light looked particularly striking and over-powering, as it would for the protagonist if she were hung over. In action line 3 we put a shadow vignette filter around the edges with a fairly low opacity to add some tension, and increased the layers of blue and decreased the brightness and contrast to imply that the sequence was happening during the night and to reflect the darker tone.