The editing process - Josh

The editing of our short film was, overall, a success. It wasn't plain sailing for the entirety of it, but me and Charlotte felt we worked really well as a pair. The fact that there were only two of us doing the editing was crucial, and we noticed a difference between last year - at AS level - when we both completed our projects in groups of four. Back then, disputes would take longer to sort out as every member of the group had a viewpoint, and there was also sometimes an issue with one or two members taking control of the group and doing most of the work, leaving the others with nothing to do. Thankfully, working in a pair suited us perfectly and we worked efficiently and in good spirits.

As with our AS level work, we used the semi-professional Final Cut Pro as opposed to Apple's iMovie as it offers a much larger range of editing options and allowed for far greater control of, and innovation with, our piece than the relatively basic iMovie would have.

Our first step was to import the rushes from our camera onto the program; there were one or two shots which didn't convert and we lost, but luckily they were unimportant. Working from our shot list we then arranged our film, choosing which version of each shot would be best, cutting them and then placing them in the correct order. While some sections were straightforward to edit - i.e. the title sequence - others were much harder. The montage sequence in particular was painstaking to construct, as we had to make a large amount of cuts in order to achieve the desired manic and choppy effect. However, set to the audio we imported, me and Charlotte thought we did a good job. In fact, our music turned out to be one of the most praised aspects of our work, as is evident in our feedback:

• 'music is used well to illustrate the emotions'
• 'edited very well...music fits perfectly'
• 'love the...dnb for the psycho moment. awesome job'
• 'the tune is tight'
• 'the music fits really well'
• 'I like the timing of the music'
• 'music's really good, fits well with the mood in all the scenes I think'

After putting our shots in sequence, some of them seemed incongruous due to the dramatic change in lighting fromr one shot to another. To remedy this, we used Final Cut Pro's Colour Corrector and adjusted the contrast and RGB settings. While not perfect, the final result of these corrections definitely aided our piece by making the editing less noticeable and improving the flow of the film.

Our choice to cut the music at the moment our protagonist pressed the doorbell was last-minute, suggested by one of our teachers. After trying it out, we knew it would be a fantastic way to increase the tension of the scene and end our film well. Having managed to sync this, we were then faced with the task of finding some ambient sound effects from Garageband to fill in the silence; we couldn't use the sound from the shots (except the last one) as we implemented the choppy editing style we had used previously, meaning the sound of the character's breathing would not be continuous. We found some ambient noise to add in but kept the sound of the traffic that we captured while filming; the combination was the perfect result.