Second Time Editing - Michael McGroarty

We uploaded our re-shot footage into Final Cut Pro; unfortunately it uploaded in one massive 31 minute clip, which meant that we had to go through the process of cutting it up, and deleting the parts we couldn't use. Through a combination of our efforts, it took about 3 hours to cut the footage down to about 10 minutes. After this initial setback, it was a simple task of using the best shots. We filmed in sequence, so piecing together the clips was easy. As we have a lack of camera movement, I wanted to have as much match-on-action as possible. Therefore, rather than having a cut at the end of each line, I cut between two shots mid sentence. Initially this proved tricky, as this is quite difficult to do without spoiling the natural flow of the dialogue. However, after several cuts, I had created a good dialogue match over 2 cuts. There was some trouble when an essential shot hadn't been filmed; there was footage at the beginning and at the end of the scene, but no actual footage of it. It involved me sweeping away the bottle-caps and having my head in my hands. The first take, after I swept away the caps, I got up and walked to the wall. However, we realised it'd be too difficult to film from the new position, so we decided to have me put my hands over my head. This shot was the one missing. To avert this disaster, I cut off a short clip of the other actor, and put it in after the take of me just about to get up. I cut early, and dragged the sound over to the reaction shot, so the sound continuity was good, and you don't see me walk away, so the physical continuity was good. The edited footage ran to 3 minutes 16 seconds. This wasn't too short; our last footage ran to 2 and a half minutes.

I kept the dialogue snappy. Some of the takes dragged towards the end, the pauses were too rigid, too thought over. It didn't have the realistic flow of a conversation. So I cut it down, made it sharper. We opted not to have a soundtrack, and we didn't need to add in any diegetic noise, so the use of GarageBand was obselete. We completed the editing in around 6 hours.

Posted by Michael McGroarty