Rough edit: Group reflecions

As a group, from the test shoot itself (such can be seen in previous posts) and whilst editing and putting together our rough edit, we made many reflections.

Speed/Timing:
Firstly, when putting all our good takes onto the timeline, we realised, even with the extra time in each shot excluded, our footage was much too long. This was due to many things; firstly, our pace was much too slow in shots, both in camera movement and within the acting. Secondly, we underestimated how many shots were needed for good continuity, and so found ourselves having to add in many more shots than anticipated. After a consultation with our teacher, we came to the conclusion that in order to not exceed the time limit and waste time on shots that we merely there for continuity, we would dissolve to a black screen where titles would appear between shots. This would allow or time to pass, and so our continuity would not be affected, but also it would help us with our pace.

Continuity:
We found that editing within the rules of continuity were more simplistic than we expected in some parts, for instance the lip gloss shot. It was just merely time-consuming ensuring that each last shot and first shot of the next shot matched up, i.e. the hand was in the same position when starting a new shot. In other shots we found this more difficult, for instance, the hugging shots. In our chosen takes, the first is a mid shot from a side-angle, and the actor reaches with her left hand coming over the other actor's shoulder. However, in our second shot the actor hugs with her right hand coming across over the other actor's shoulder, and her left arm stays quite low. This made our task very difficult, as the two shots could never match up continuously, so we spent a lot of time trying to make it as unnoticeable as possible, by showing less of the first shot, so less of the first hug is seen.

Set/Mise-en-scene:
We found that in several of our shots, lights, tripod legs or slight reflections/shadows were in them. We scaled some shots so that this wasn't an issue, but this was not idealistic at all. This again made it very hard to edit our shots together realistically, but was an issue with our test shoot.

Lighting:
As we've had many issues with the lighting on the test shoot, we found editing to make our shots look continuous difficult, as many of our shots were slightly different lit. However, the dissolves to the titles in-between our shots helped us very much to conceal the discontinuity of the lighting between shots.We now know the importance of lighting carefully and not changing the lighting over the filming process. As well as this, we discovered the effects of filming with the interference of natural lighting and have decided to black out the windows for the shoot so that we can film at any time without much variation in the lighting

Dialogue:
We realized when watching our dialogue that it doesn't work well, and so have begun to redraft our scripts to suit a more realistic and spontaneous conversation between the two characters. We discovered that the dialogue we had originally intended to have in our opening sequence was not natural enough and appeared as if we were just adding it in to set the scene.  In terms of editing together our conversations, we had one or two difficulties due to continuity. We realised we had to get the actors to repeat their movements exactly for continuity reasons, for example match on action.

 

How we have planned for the next shoot:

We have edited our shoot board to incorporate the adaptations we have thought of for the next shoot on Saturday 1st March and are now finishing prop lists for each individual member of the group so that there will be no confusion on who is bringing each prop on the day.