Embarking on the Editing process

Embarking on the editing process was difficult. It required me to become accustomed with using 'Final Cut Pro'.

In terms of camerawork, I wanted to edit the piece as closely resemble a psychological thriller as much as possible. This included cutting the shots as close together as possible to create high speed editing. I cross cutted between shots on two different locations, interspersing shots of our protagonist running down a tunnel with panning and tracking shots of our antagonist. We hope that the change of speed of action during the scenes will cause tension and build suspense. The slow looming shots of the antagonist interspersed with shots of the protagonist rushing around her bedroom or running down a tunnel builds suspense. It was hard to find the right balance when editing, sometimes upon reviewing the editing I had done, I realised it had become so quick and fast pace that it was actually hard to follow and understand so I had to elongate some shots to make it more understandable.

We had problems with our narrative, and decided to reorder our series of shots to make our final version of our opening sequence more easy to follow. This included rearranging sequences of shots and tightening certain shots to move seamlessly into others. When editing two shots of our protagonist running, I tried to match up the end and beginning of each shot with the next foot our protagonist landed on. We experienced problems with continuity and had to reshoot some scenes. We include a variety of interior, exterior and low light and day light shots.

Sound was also hard to figure out on Final Cut Pro, all music and sound effects had to be matched directly to the video and we used fade in and outs in the music to build suspension. I had to edit the recording of our protagonist's mother in order to make the recording sound like it was coming from our protagonist's mobile phone. I learned how to enable and disable certain clips so i could layer the atmospheric sound that our composer sent us; for instance in shots of our antagonist i layered the original soundtrack with extra creepy atmospheric soundtrack to make it more eerie.

We decided if we used a title sequence inspired by 'True Detective' TV drama for every actor then it would become confusing. So, we have tried to match the 'True Detective' inspired photos on top of the film, using fade in and out transitions. We hope this defines the illusive, thriller aspect of our film.