Post-production 2 - Narrative

Our aim this week was to cut the performance and after we realized that need to stop concentrating on single shots and stop obssessing over if a shot is cut exactly on the beat or not , but actually getting the right shots on the time line in order to finish the rough cut, everything was much easier. We managed to finish the rough cut and we were ready for the narrative to be filled in. We had to log the narrative shots. We realized that we have over 100 takes that had to be marked and this took us some time to sort out the best takes. We had to be very careful with using the right shots in order to follow up the story. I changed the order a few times because the first time we started editing from the wrong point with the "Bond" character finding me too early and therefore we ended up with not enough shots. It was not a big problem because I just dragged the shots further away and put others of him approaching the bus where I was kidnapped in order to create tension. Putting in the narrative was more challenging then we thought and very time consuming. Nina and I spent a lot of time editing and learning from our mistakes and fixing, pollishing and even redoing a number of times what we spent hours on before, but this is the nature of editing you have to create in order to see if it has the effect that you want and then re-make again. I found on the internet some useful quotes of famous editors:


http://en.proverbia.net/citastema.asp?tematica=376

New take on the video:


You can see in the picture below a shot of one of the James Bond films when he is saving the girl, exactly what we wanted to portray:
We got some feedback from our editing experts and they suggested that the video would be better if we concentrate on the actual narrative more rather than the performance. This meant that we needed more shots to play with for example reaction shots of me to Merlin or struggling shots, more shots of him walking, creating tension towards the saving act. We wanted to portray him as the hero by using a revealing shot of him when coming on the bus. Nevertheless, we had to go back to our original footage and cut bits in order to have a more variety of additonal shots if needed. The way of creating a more film based video was to have sequences of narrative rather than just single shots followed by performance shots. We used the same skills when editing our thriller in AS as for the cutting of the narrative one uses a similar technique - thinking of continuity, builting up tension, portraying the characters in the right way (Merlin - hero, me - victim, then typical portrayal of the Bond girl) by using low angle shots, close-ups.  So, we had to go through the video again and think of possible sequences of shots that would fit together. Nina and I decided to cut the song down by 30 sec in order not to be too repetitive and long. Additionally, it would be easier for us to market the song if promoting the typical 60s and 70s James Bond wave being also very British and famous. Therefore it fits with the song well. We had a several sequences starting with him approaching the bus, you can see me struggling, next was him coming on the bus, releasing - short happy moment, then the tension increases because the bad guy comes and tries shooting us - we run, fourth final sequence is when the Bond character shoots him.

An example of a film soundtrack is Pearl Harbor - There You'll Be where you can see how the music video cuts from the narrative to performance shots, but still keeps sequences. You can also notice that the lyrics match the narrative sometimes as we tried to do in our video as well.