Editing Process 1

After filming our thriller opening, this week we moved on to editing. Initially, we spent the first lesson reviewing and cutting down our footage, as we want our sequence to be fast paced and to have lots of short, sharp cuts. 

As can be seen from this screen shot of our work on Final Cut Pro X, after cutting down the footage that we need, we moved on to changing the colour of the sequence. The way that we imagined to have our thriller opening is to be predominantly black and white, with red being the only visible colour, as it is symbolic and plays a central role in our story line.   

However, converting the footage into black and white but keeping red, is proving to be more difficult than we previously imagined so we have been experimenting with a number of techniques to achieve this. Such as, colour masks like the one shown in this screen shot which work effectively in regards to colour but need to be moved each time the character moves which is a long process.  

We used other processes than the colour masks, such as highlighting the colour red with a dropper and filtering out any other colours, the only problem with this method, as can be seen from the screen shot of our main character, this tool is very sensitive, picking up the faint red hue, hence it has picked up on the pink in our actresses' complexion and means that her face is not totally black and white.  

Within this scree shot the effect of the contrasting red upon the black and white background is shown and, we feel looks quite effective. Another technique that we used was to achieve this was to add the 'Black and White' filter from the options of filters and apply this, then slowly filter colour back in to the shot. 

Overall, this week as a group we have been experimenting with the editing software and getting the basic colours in place, before we go back and improve them. After cutting down the footage we also feel that our sequence may be a little short, therefore we intend to storyboard and film an extra scene to add in to the original footage to improve our thriller opening.