Post Production Journal

After we had done all the filming, then came the time to edit our sequence together! Before we were able to start editing our piece together, we had to learn how to use the software; Final Cut Pro. Final Cut Pro is a sophisticated, industry level software that enables us to put together the clips we have previously filmed and create a film. In order to start learning about the software we thought it would be good if we just went straight into it, instead of just hearing someone talk about it, so as a group we got given a particualar aspect of Final Cut and had to find out how to use it by going onto the apple macs. We then went through all the different areas as a class and by this time it meant we pretty much knew how to use the software and we went onto importing the clips onto the computer.

Once they were imported, we had to take a look at our storyboard and work out what order our clips had to come in and how they were all going to look in our film. After looking at this we had to decide if we were going to use any transistions between the clips and allocate an editor (which we later decided on was Georgia for this particular task). Adding our clips into the timeline in the order we wanted them to go, it then meant we were able to decide on how we wanted our film to look. This was the time we had to make some vital decisions for example having to decide what music we wanted to play in the background of our film. To start with we decided we wanted to use a certain song but when we got to editing our clips together, we decided we no longer liked that song and wanted to change it. This would have meant re filming the first scene as it is a close up of the protgonists phone with the title of the song on and also re syncing all our clips to the new film. This was a big choice we had to make as it would have been a lot of work and this is definitely something that I have learnt; decide on exactly what everything is going to be in the pre production instead of editing.

Once we had finished editing it all together, we had to watch it all fully back and unfortunately found a couple of continuity errors that, being this late in the day, we were unable to change. Overall it was a good experience doing a preliminary task as it meant we could practise on all the equitment and learn how to use it, aswell as learning all the different skills that it takes in order to be a director.