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Lesson 1:

The 16th was my first lesson due to missing the induction week because of an orthodontic appointment at home. We focused on storytelling in the edit.

We learn that many of the key attributes needed in this field are flexibility, adaptability, and the ability to manage our ideas. The nature of our role means we work very closely with directors. Dialogue in scrips can often be cut out of the final film; don't be afraid to show not tell more often. Many scripts are overwritten as body language is more powerful on film than on paper.

Organising test screenings is a convenient and professional way to get feedback on your edit's progress. Giving each viewer a piece of paper with questions and space to leave their thoughts, can be more beneficial than people checking up at odd different times.

Looking at 3 films with Oscar Winning Editing, we watched and focused our discussions on 'Raging Bull' (ed. Thelma Schoonmaker, 1980), 'Born on the Fourth of July' (ed. David Brenner Joe Hutshings, 1989) and 'Everything Everywhere All at Once' (ed. Paul Rogers, 2022).

Ragin Bull -Pool + boxing scene.

-Conflict speeds up pacing. (Scorsese filmed shots at 3 speeds)

-Slow motion = more voyeuristic. Predatory-like suspension created as pacing charged.

-Placement of scenes can drastically change a story's understanding/feel

We also discussed the decision to keep some of the scenes silent as it is more effective. Thema mentioned in a q&a during the Edinburgh Film Festival, that their decision to change it to black and white was due to the red of the gloves and blood not feeling as impactful when in colour.

BOTFOJ

Using M.S's and tracking shots guide the audience through the harsh hospital, especially lingering with close-ups to emphasise his realisation of never walking again.

-The interruption of combining steadicam with tight static shots creates a sense of entrapment/restriction to reflect the characters whilst highlighting the resilience of this organised character through the tidy even frame.

EEAAO

-Frequent use of visual cues to show the change in characters (dif multiverses) through de-saturation and vast dreamlike sound design.

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Portrait - 'On Another Note'

'Samuel613', Dir. Billy Lumby, 2015.

Act 1: 25% -Contains all we need to know to understand the film's story.

-Character

-Situation

-Time+ Place

-Relationships

-Launch quest/ask questions

-Inciting incidents

(sometimes in A2) causes imbalance, and understand protagonist's objective+motivation.

Act 2: 50%

-Progressive complications

-Conflict and obstacles to solving the quest/ answering the question

-Change and development

-Drama increases in intensity throughout act.

Act 3: 25% (doesn't always tie up ends)

-Drama continues to rise

-Protagonist confronts ultimate challenge

-Do or do not reach their goal.

How is the question/ quest of A1 answered in A3? (sufficient ending?)

Conflict:

-Substance of drama = conflict -> needs to meet obstacle +more than just fights and arguments.

-Reveals character

-Identifies protagonist

-Meaningful, about the human condition.

-Identify conflict + obstacles help focus drama. (in EDIT).

Quest- Poses a question that will be answered at the end of the film. what does the protagonist want?

Story Intensity- A1 must build as each act must, to an act climAX. Position of act climax important- before the end of act 2.

Story Arc:

(useful to plot out when your story feels in trouble

Character

Obstacle

Action (quest)

Result

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We broke down Guy Nattiv's 'Skin' (2018) into scenes to establish how their reached the goal of getting the audience to connect emotionally .

pacing /shot choice/ dialogue/ sound } creates ->

Discovery - generates surprise + anticipation

Turning Points - Change in narrative direction of story -unpredictable/ dynamic/ raises stakes.

Reversals - Giant turning point [use sparingly to keep impact]

Antagonist -> Person/society, blocking pursuit of goal

For this film:

-A1 ended after the shooting by the lake scene

-Inciting incident was the supermarket/ car park scene

-A3 starts when the dad is dumped home

Dads goal- Teach his son his values

Reversals- Becomes unrecognisable, fully tattooed.

Restored- Son uses his morals.

Turning Points- confrontation at the supermarket.

Discoveries : Nazi tattoo(s) - Troy's (son) fascination with nature/snakes/learing.

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Dialogue in Film (from Melodrama to Action-Adventure) 

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Dialogue in Film (from Melodrama to Action-Adventure) 

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'All That Heaven Allows'

'The Terminator'

'Dialogue is one of the least imaginatively treated types of sequences.'

-Ken Dancyger, The Technique of Film and Video Editing.

Function of Dialogue:

Info

Surprise

Conflict

Turning Points

Reversals > creates anticipation, grows character.

-In Terminator, we see this happen over the phone and in the car as exposition to build tension and raise stakes through M.S, O.T.S, SRS.

-In ATHA Melodrama the editor creates pauses for suspense, awkwardness, to show thinking and characters mind's changing. The framing changes as he walks forward, a low angle is seen as she changes her mind. Revealing the subtext that he is eager to find out if she is pretending to not be interested.

In 'On Film Editing', Edward Dmytryk visualises the timing between delivery and reaction. As the verb comes first in English, listeners react/know what is to be said faster. This means cuts should reflect this.

Cut (to listener shot) when the viewer knows what the character understands!

Paranoid park presents interesting director/editorial choices in the breakup scene with Jennifer. By not hearing the actual dialogue being spoken but instead focusing on her reaction with Contrapuntal sound, it does work more effectively and creates a sense of distance from her, reflecting how our protagonist Alex felt. This was likely shot normally and a decision made in post.

A similar situation is presented in the coffee shop scene but it arguably doesn't work as well.

'When we tell a story in cinema, we should resort to dialogue only when it is impossible to do otherwise.’

Alfred Hitchcock

'The Power of the dog', Jane Campion (2021)

After watching this scene in class, I went home to watch the whole film as i found the partly conventional use of shots very clever.

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I did these as i worked through the lessons to help me take in information easier

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(have all become 100% since practicing as revision)

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After wrapping up our day of filming very late on November 2nd, I downloaded all the video and audio files onto my hard drive that night, finding someone with a backup the following day as a safety measure. Due to an essay, I wasn't able to edit until a day later on Monday evening. I ran into some problems. When importing the media, only half of it was transcoded onto the nexus before an error message about insufficient space appeared. This stunted my ability to sync that evening, despite my best efforts there was nothing I could do. To make the most of my time, I returned home and put all the sound files onto a timeline to export to transcribing software so my director and I could start organising the structure.

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During the post-production class, the next day I brought up the issue and managed to get it sorted, the full amount of storage wasn't allocated to the 'ba3 work' drive yet. After this, I started from scratch, importing my media and then syncing everything before my evening commitments. One weird issue I encountered was the large amount of storage these imports were taking, despite them being transcoded to the right resolution.

Due to still not hearing back from my director who I messaged the day before (and was depending on the other half of the transcriptions for as I used up the free limit), I asked the dop to use her account to transcribe the other half that night ready for me to look through the next day.

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After my other module's class finished on Wednesday 6th, I came to finish the syncing. That evening I heard from a fellow student my director was very ill and is recovering for a few days. With this, I organised to meet my dop/producer Eve, to help bounce structure ideas off. Our original plans were not quite followed during the filming process as our subject was hesitant to say as much as we had hoped about the sensitive topic of a past relationship. This meant we needed a new climax or had to find another way around it.

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I spent that morning and afternoon going through the 40 pages of transcriptions and highlighting them into 4 different categories:

-A1 (pink) more about Honey herself and general background knowledge.

-A2 (green) the History/ foraging segment

-A2/3 peak question (blue) what got you into witchcraft/ possible dialogue that establishes a toxic relationship/ negative/ commercialisation.

-A3/4 (orange) Community montage, positive ending.

This became very useful in the following days when deciding what to use to form a story. Being able to bounce ideas off that night gave me a sense of direction on where to start and I began editing the first few seconds of the opening until mav closed for the night.

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I had a full edit day and got up to roughly 3 minutes onto the timeline. Despite this good progress, I was slightly worried and running behind schedule due to the delay in knowing what was happening in transcriptions and story structure. I quickly realised it took double the time to edit and simultaneously look through so many interviews to decide what would flow well next before having to find it amongst all the footage.

The next day (Saturday), I worked the whole day and was unable to make any progress. Then, come Sunday, I had little time to spare before the mav closed at 5 p.m. (due to getting home in the early morning hours from work). I spent the rest of that day at home, researching for a presentation I had for my other module on Wednesday.

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I had half of this day to continue my edit. In the morning, I had a review session with my group, Sana and Susan. Lots of feedback helped me know what to refine and what worked and didn't. I spent the rest of that afternoon making the adjustments.

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There was a lot of progress made this day. In the evening, once I had a rough cut of A2 (forage and tree scene), my director came and helped with a lot of the structure. We spent the evening refining the sequence and choosing different tree footage that would pair well with the historical voiceover I had arranged.

The following day I had my usual class and presentation on Wednesday and an evening flight home to Essex for an orthodontist appointment. This meant no progress was able to be made that day or Thursday (as I can't access edit facilities away). Helpfully, my director did put together a document whilst I was away, containing a rough direction that she wanted Act 3 to go. This made the process when returning on Friday quicker.

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I spent all day compiling the dialogue wanted for this last section, it came from a range of the scenes, some outside, some inside. This meant that if we were to use it, archive footage was needed over a lot of it. I also encountered another problem I had been fearing. On set, the camera card for the B interview camera became full a few times meaning, a lot of the other angle was not captured. For this section, this made it very difficult to cut between and reorder the interview. I worked with what I had and created a rough cut ready for feedback the following day.

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I spent this afternoon going through all the archive provided by Honey, placing it over my footage despite being weary to use mostly photos with pan and zooms. I hoped the review session with my group and Sana the next day would help give perspective on what my mind had gone immune to from looking too much. Today was my original deadline for picturelock but we decided we can and must spare another day or two on the edit. (exactly 10 minutes long)

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Whole timeline was completed (apart from archive footage over v.o). Had feedback from a friend outside my group and adjusted some tweaks brought up that afternoon.

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With a review session from my whole group, we concluded the archive used does not work well and we must resort to reworking the end of the narrative so it flows better, using other interviews so not as much archive is needed. With this, my director stayed to help work through this narrative. We had to cut back, we realised we couldn't fit every aspect we originally wanted to in the end and still do the film justice. We cut a whole family story section and little sections that felt random (e.g. commercialisation). Once mostly done in the evening, Shelby (dir.) left and I worked on all the adjustments everyone suggested for the piece as a whole. At this point, the archive section felt too short so we both brainstormed that night, looking for bits of the interview we could steal to round it off nicely.

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Luckily we managed to picture lock this day. Due to my final orthodontist appointment, I had to leave on Wednesday, so this meant there was no extra time to work on the edit before moving on to sound.

Starting bright and early, I spent a few hours finalising the archive section with the reworked ideas from the night before and laid over my footage. Ready for my director to come and review after lunchtime, we made some slight final adjustments and had our sound designer watch it for the first time to be sure everything was good for the next stage. He gave some feedback that we considered modifying but also made a valid point of our creative decision, not having Honey confess she is a witch. Originally, we planned to have this section at the end but, it didn't feel needed when we got around to it.

To evaluate if audiences who previously knew nothing about our idea would be confused, we asked a random student in the editing suite to watch it and see what they established. About a minute in they understood the character and theme straight away. With this, we proceeded to export, the colour grade one taking proving challanging due to its new suggested workflow.

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unable to find link but practiced in class.

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(most helpful)

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSelFkzvuxdvvET3Tcv1ISY-55Qwj-_HFXj9vRStTsUPCgFM2w/viewform?usp=sf_link

my own created one ^

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originally expected layback for the 28th

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update to group about feedback changes made

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(Fred)

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After exporting for both the colour grade and sound, I left a week and a bit for Fred (sound designer) and Barret (abroad colourist) to work their magic. Giving both of them some direction and notes from my director, I checked up from time to time, making sure no issues would arise too late, especially as I had to go home for half a week for an orthodontist appointment. I knew both the teams were not able to start for a while but everything seemed to be operational.

I advised the latest day for layback should be the 30th at a push as Mav is unstaffed and closes at 5pm on the weekend. I anticipated having the 28/29th to put everything together so if any issues did arise, I had support from staff and the screen academy technicians.

On Friday 29th, our designer invited us to view the edit at lunch to provide some feedback. Eve and I, watched it whilst I noted what worked well and any improvements. The progress was slower than we expected and we quickly realised it would be of use for that extra day for adjustments.

As for the grade, on Thursday night I found out the grader hadn't made a start yet as the footage sent to him via a team member's drive didn't upload properly and only had text files. Upon being contacted, as I was available at the time created a new space to reupload everything as quickly as possible to avoid further delays. The wifi at my flat took one hour to upload 3gb out of about 400. Re-evaluating, I did wifi speed tests for every network I had access to and realised the ethernet at jack kilby would upload the quickest.

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Due to all the onedrive issues happening (now being sorted out with Paul Sellors) I was accessing my friend's storage via their account on my laptop. By the time I arrived in uni, they were asleep meaning I would have to connect ethernet to my laptop to gain the same speed but annoyingly my Macbook had no ethernet port and I knew of no adapter for this. Re-examining my options, I would have had to stay they night for all the footage to upload. As that wasn't an option for me, I used the computers in the centre and logged in via my director's google drive. Thankfully the footage took just over an hour before being ready for the grader. Due to the huge time differences with California, it did prove challenging to stay updated but it was completed a day later with us able to access it from Saturday morning.

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I returned to mav that afternoon to see the final adjustments for the sound design and put together the colour grade on DaVinci. Unfortunately, an issue did arise that weekend and no staff were around. None of the computers would open the project as it was done on the newest version of the software which wasn't up to date on our software and therefore was unable to be opened. I only had the free version on my laptop so much of the footage had a huge watermark. After evaluating we realised the grader would need to make the slight adjustments I was planning to, then export it as a mov for me to put together. Luckily, they had a spare code for me to access their paid version so that night I installed it and started putting things together. The only issue I had was syncing the sound and video exactly by timecodes, I knew what second the sound and video started on the Napier logo but the timelines started at different codes.

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I went into mav again to check the starting timecode for the protocols project. Luckily I successfully managed to pair the picture and sound. I then made final credit adjustments, created all my exports and submitted them.

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Overall, watching it back on a big screen with an audience was better than I expected. I had some worries about the quality, graininess, and overall final choices which some people liked whilst others didn't, but it was very rewarding. I'm happy with how my edit turned out, especially knowing our subject liked it.

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Lots of good feedback about;

The old tree

Character development

Hooking throughout

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Beginning glitter-like sound effects too on the nose. (Agreed, this can be changed.)

Hold on cutaways for longer at the start. (I also recognised this during my viewings as more breathing space would've been useful to help settle audiences into the story, however, we underestimated how many of these we would need on set and therefore did not have much other footage to include. )

Sana disliked our archive cutaways to the wands during the foraging section. ( We spent a lot of time debating their inclusion however, after getting options from other viewers who were eager to see them, we decided to keep it in.)

Archive section longer? (To do this, we would have to go over our 10-minute time limit and shoot other footage to place over. We ended up cutting 2 minutes of dialogue as it was too much information to fit into a small time frame.)

The cut from inside the house to outside felt awkward for some viewers. (Originally it was more on the nose as we cut when she mentioned her dog foraging with her. We decided this transitioned slightly smoother but will reconsider this in the future before festival submissions).