Study Journal Entry: Project #2 Short Film

Rough Cut

For our second project, Professor Melendez assigned us a short film project. The footage was from a short film, “Of The Earth” about a world where all parents died, leaving only children alive on Earth. This was the first short film project I have ever edited, and it wasn’t the easiest project either. There was a ton of footage to go through, and we really needed to watch through all the footage because there were multiple takes for one scene. Some takes weren’t perfect; the actors looked directly into the camera, or the director was speaking in between lines. Every take was ever so slightly different, so it was timely to watch all of them to find the take you wanted to use for your project. For this project we needed to create a short sequence and a long sequence, the short sequence being between 5-7 minutes and the long sequence between 10-12 minutes. After watching all the footage, I decided it would be easier to start with the long sequence, and then edit from there to create the long sequence.

The most helpful part of the pre-editing stage for me was reading through all the paperwork Professor Melendez provided for us. I read through the whole OTE script a few times to really understand the story and the sequence of events. After reading through the script and understanding the order of events, I started organizing my media. I started by naming all the folders based on what was happening in the scenes. This was very helpful when it came to selecting clips because I had a general idea of what was going on in each media folder. Once everything was named and organized, I began pulling footage into the timeline. Because this was the rough cut, I just started by placing the clips in order of the script into the timeline. From there, I did some basic cutting just to shorten bits that were too long. Once all the clips were in the timeline and in order, the hardest part of the editing was the cuts of dialogue between Mikey and Will. Some clips had slightly different lighting and audio levels, so it was difficult to make it all look seamless. Because this was a more dramatic and emotional short film as opposed to an action film, I wanted to avoid really fast and frequent quick cuts. I was actually ok with holding shots slightly longer than normal because this was a more emotional short film. Once I was happy with the narrative and structure of the long sequence, I started on the short sequence.

For the short sequence, it was going to be difficult to sum up the whole story in 5-7 minutes. As editors, we had creative freedom to decide what clips were essential for the narrative of the story, and what parts weren’t. This sequence was sort of the bones of the story, and didn’t include the “fluff” of the story, such as Mikey playing around in the house. After creating the long sequence and fully understanding the narrative, I thought it was relatively easy to create the short sequence.

While it wasn’t easy and the editing itself was pretty tedious, I thought this project really pushed me to truly understand a narrative and test my abilities not only as an editor, but also as a storyteller.

Fine Cut

Remember when I said the rough cut was hard? Well let me tell you the fine cut was 10x harder. This was the chance to fix those little sound and lighting problems that I had in the rough cut. About 5 minutes into the fine cut, I realized the sound and lighting of the original footage was all over the place. Nothing was concise, from the sound levels to the lighting inside and outside, nothing matched. Some clips were extremely loud while others were really soft, and other clips were really cool while others were very warm. This was really my first experience fixing color and audio in an editing project, so while I don’t think my fine cut is perfect, I think I gave it my best shot. Some of the color and the sound is still definitely off, but I think it’s a big improvement from the rough cut.