Beginning Editing - First Steps

After having completed both shoots in the studio and in the scrap yard, now is time for post-production. Our first job was to start logging the shots and chose the best ones from the performing. We first decided to create a performance video without the narrative, so later when we are ready to put it in, we can always play around with the performance shots, which are already in place throughout the whole song. We had a variety of performance shots and therefore we chose the best ones by marking them with  "Best Take" as you will be able to see below in the screen video I took while editing. Some of the shots for example a shot of just the guitarist had additional ones within it, such as a close-up of his hand playing and the strings, his face, mid-shot. Therefore we put a marker in each shot so we can use them later easier and we would now where to find what if we need a certain shot. We learnt from the preliminary task how to do this and look for the beat in order to cut in the right places, so we knew what we were doing and we manages to finish quite quick. Next step was to drag all the shots which were marked as "best takes" on the time line on top of each other and synch them. This is very important because once finished with that we could simply concentrate on cutting because every shot is in time with the song. 

However, we realized that ones started editing properly there were more complications to come. Nina and I were the ones doing all the editing and were are not very experienced with Final Cut Pro because the last time we used it was when we did our thriller and the editing technique with the music videos is slightly different and you need time to get the hang of it. We spent hours and hours in the edit suit trying to choose the right shots, making sure that we use variety of shots and angles.We learnt new editing tools. We learnt how to use the razor tool in order to cut shots easily - you press B and press where you want to cut then A for arrow in order to make the shot as long as we wish. We also had to be careful in terms of continuity e.g. avoid jumpy cuts and shots. We also had a few problems with the lead singer not knowing some of the words of the songs and because of that we always had to choose a different shot intead. The drummer was also not always in time and we had trouble with making sure that she plays the drums according to the music. We also had some problems with cutting on the beat because for some reason we were cutting off-beat sometimes and on the beat other times. So, we had to be careful with that as well.

This is a clip of me editing: