Professional Practice: EDITING!

Sound.

I wanted a composer for the video as I felt it would really bring the video to life, having an upbeat track behind it. I found some royalty free music that I really liked and felt it would fit with my edit, so contacted the guy that created it – Marcus Neely, and asked to use it if I credit him. I had to slow down the song as it was a little bit too quick and didn't want the video too look silly.

The music was shorter than my video so I had to duplicate it so it could fit across my whole video. To make it blend in I faded out the end a little and overlapped it, which worked great.

Visuals.

Editing the video was a huge process! I was very excited to see how it would all turn out but was a little confused as to how to lay it all out. I still had a lot of footage to look through as I didn't have time to sit sieving through hours and hours of footage. I decided to create a new script working on the footage I had, this meant I could plan it out and know what direction I would take with the edit.

Jeremy's interview came out better than expected, so I decided to use Jeremy as the foundation for the video, I wanted him to introduce the project and then use him as a main voice over for the rest of the video but make sure I also had sections where there was no interview, and soley music and environment, this would let the video breathe and not become too 'documentary' and interview heavy - I want the video to be formative, but still entertaining and fun to watch.

I decided to first look through the footage and find any sequences that we had shot; I then picked out all the best ones and put them into my timeline. Looking back over the script, I matched the sequences to the script and placed them along with any parts of the interview I thought they might go well with. Rachel wanted the video non linear, so I mixed up the order of the heritage sites and kept switching between each one.

I created an introduction for the video using Google Earth and zoomed right in to North Kent, I then added a flash of white afterwards and cut to the outside of Guildhall Museum. I also made a bug to put at the bottom of the right screen as I’d asked Rachel if CONK has a logo but she informed me they do not.

During the edit, I made sure to fix the volume and cut out sounds that was overpowering or jolted a little when the clip ends. I also made sure to make sounds louder of the children answering questions and getting involved, as Rachel was very keen on having the children participate.

Although we’d tried our best not to film some children, we did have the odd person that the school teachers found when they watched the rough draft. Some shots I was able to replace the shot, however, some children featured in the background of a good shot and I wasn’t able to find one similar to it. This part of the final stages of the edit was extremely long! Although I'd sent the video numerous times to a certain school, they kept finding people in each edit, even though that one shot had been there the whole time but they didn't notice it. This proved to be challenging but it taught me to be more careful next time with who I film as it does get quite time consuming sending a video a lot of times.

After showing Rachel the final draft, she sat down with me and we made little adjustments all day so that she was 100% happy with the outcome. I was really shocked and pleased with her reaction, as she seemed to really like the video, which I’m really happy about!

Overall, the edit was challenging but also quite fun to do once I had the basic structure and got into it. It was great to see it all come together, as when we watched just the footage, it doesn't do much justice as some shots was quite long and without it all cut up and sequenced, they don't look very appealing. 

However, I'm proud of the video and although I would make slight changes and don't agree with some of the changes Rachel wanted me to make - I think it's turned out really well! :)