Entry #15: Finally Finished

Mood: Nervous-Excited Hybrid

Gasp! Can it be? Are we really finished? After hours of editing, we have finally created our finished product. It feels SO weird to not have any more concrete work (besides the super fun creative critical reflection which I am now working on) to do. I'm a little wary about being finished with the film intro, and I've probably watched it 100 more times trying to find any technical flaws.

We had a draft of our final product about 2 days ago, but neither Srish nor I liked how a few parts looked in the sequence, which was unacceptable because this film is our baby; we created the ideas, did the work to film (twice), and edited for extended periods of time, so we needed to love it. We thought about filming again and changing the idea for the Grace and Lindsay scenes, but we knew that it wasn't an option. Instead, I went home and played with the scenes, adding in different ones together that seemed more natural. I changed the levels of the suspenseful music and added some dialogue from extra scenes that were in the background from when the intruder is in the house, maintaining a realistic sound perspective. After 3 hours of constantly replaying the same scenes, I finally liked how the sequence looked put together (albeit, I got very tired of watching our film opening). The Grace and Lindsay scenes, which always seemed to give us trouble, appeared more natural.

This amazing website gave me an idea of what I should be looking for when editing, which allowed me to make our film intro of better quality. The site suggested cutting out the lingering parts in dialogue, since they can often be overdramatic (trust me, we found that out the hard way), making clean cuts, and showing a variety of angles during a two-person conversation; these tips helped me decide what scenes to manipulate so that I could create more interesting scenes.

Then, we had the issue of timing. Our film opening was 2 minutes and 15 seconds, yet there is 2 minute limit. Cutting out 15 seconds of a film opening is a lot harder than I would have ever thought because every second feels so necessary. However, after reforming the original draft of our opening, I found that cutting out extra scenes made the film stronger. Our final time is 1 minute and 59 seconds. Success! I will be posting the film opening shortly, and I am extremely excited (and nervous) to show it because we have spent so much time fostering one little idea into this cool production.

All I know is that I throughly enjoyed every aspect of this project, even the stressful parts because it was part of my journey. I have learned so much about the filmmaking process, even though we only created the film opening. I have to give props to all of the filmmakers out there because the process is arduous, yet extremely rewarding. I'm so glad that I had the opportunity to participate in this long-term project because it has taught me much about the time management, cooperation, and creativity skills that I didn't even realize I possessed. Thank you!

Peters, Oliver. “12 Tips for Better Film Editing.” Digital Films. Wordpress. 16 Dec. 2008. Web. 4 April 2016.