AS Media
Progress tracker of AS Media project by Matthew Facer
Candidate Number: 7547
Editing Process:
Our editing process was not a simple one by any stretch. We encountered a few issues along the way but we also learned a lot too. It was when we came to the editing process that we truly appreciated the preliminary task as the experience in that process gave us the basic skills we needed to make a decent start - had we not had the basic experience, we would have found the editing task too difficult I'm sure.
The editing program we used in the preliminary task was PowerDirector and it was very simplified. During the prelim, myself and James struggled but Jordan seemed to do well and, thus, we elected Jordan as our main editor whilst James and I gave advice from the side. Jordan enjoyed editing and he looked to be confident on PowerDirector which is why it was so unfortunate that we had to then change programs for the final task.
iMovie was the editing software we used for the final task and it was certainly a lot more complicated. We struggled a lot more on this program as we found the interface slightly more confusing - it took us a whole lesson to work out how to save what we'd done! In terms of putting clips together, it was fairly simple but the difficulties came with incorporating sound bites into the film. James and I worked hard to find different music and sound effects to put in but, upon reflection, we see now that the audio portion of our film is probably the weakest section. Our filming wasn't too bad for a group of students who'd never picked up a camera before. We had to go back and re-shoot a few times but our overall shot quality was actually very good especially when you also put into consideration how poor the camera quality was.
When we came to inserting our production company logo and film title, we actually found it pretty easy. We merged our film title into the end of the film with a dramatic police siren which creates a lot of tension and makes the audience want to watch on. There was definitely some inspiration taken from TV programmes such as The Bill and Casualty which have a similar style of introducing the credits. We found this a simple yet very effective method of making our film title stand out. As mentioned earlier, it was James & I's job to find royalty-free audio clips to use and the 2 songs we used were called "Spy Story" and "Last Stand". Jordan did a great job of ensuring that "Spy Story" merged into "Last Stand" in a way that made sure it didn't sound too sudden or not fit the clip for which it was intended. We found that we didn't need to really put in many diegetic foley sounds in the editing process as sounds such as the motorbike and walking in corridors were perfectly loud and clear enough anyway which meant no extra editing was required. Generally, we managed our sound layers very well and nothing sounded unnatural whatsoever.
In summary, we found the editing process to be difficult in some respects but we ploughed forwards and managed to use the program to a good level. The main struggles came with knowing exactly how to use sound efficiently with video clips but we soon learned how to and managed to finish in time! It was a great learning experience for our group as a whole.