Editing Diary: 2

We eventually got round to importing the track to use in the editing process of our video, as to progress much further without the song could have a negative effect at a later stage, making the editing much more difficult for us. I personally owned the EP on which the track was contained, so I brought my copy of the CD in and uploaded the track onto iTunes. We then imported this into iMovie using the audio tool. This allowed us to begin fitting the visuals to the song, both in terms of positioning the shots of the narrative in coordination with the lyrics, emphasising the convention of the slightly illustrative style we were aiming for. This also served to strengthen the relationship between the music and the visuals, meaning we could edit the clips to fit to the pace and beat of the song, in order to create an overall fluid visual style. The main beat of the track was on a bar of 4, which promoted ease of editing in that as it is an even number, if we wished to use short, sharp clips and a faster edit in places, we could cut them to last for half of a bar, meaning they wouldn't stand out and become too visually abrupt.

It proved to be beneficial for us at this stage to have such a vast selection of different clips of any one action to choose from, as the flexible filming enabled us to pick and choose the one we though would work best next without being forced into a certain line or structure as storyboarded, which would then be difficult to change and avoid certain problems if there were no more clips to choose from.

One problem that we encountered during this stage was that of the lighting and camera quality in the bedroom scenes. As we had been very reliant on natural lighting whilst recording, this took effect on the end footage as different angles seemed to consist of different lighting. This took a negative effect on the cohesion of the clips to create one overall scene, as the appearance of the scene was inconsistent. We experimented with various editing effects to resolve this, and decided our best hope was to use the brightness and contrast tool in order to lighten the image, and then make it slightly sharper and clearer by adding a slight amount of contrast. Unfortunately, this did have a negative effect on the overall quality of the visuals, but there is not much we can do to resolve this, short of scrapping the entire clip altogether, subsequently creating a massive gap in our narrative.

Despite this problem, the majority of this part of the editing process was fairly simple and straightforward - as our video is narrative based and accompanies a fairly slow paced track, the majority of the transitions we are using between shots are that of straight cuts. This allows for an uninterrupted visual flow, and also helps in promoting the idea of continuity crucial to the conveyance of our ideas. These also allowed us to clearly portray a number of match-on-action shots, for example in this scene when Beth rolls over in bed, or when Oscar turns his head to look at her before getting up - a straight cut here allows us to cut immediately to show the actors face, thereby clearly using body language and facial expression to create the mood and atmosphere of our narrative.

In addition, we muted all of the clips to remove any background sound that would at all undermine the authority of the song, allowing the track to be the sole focus of aural attention and not distracted from in any way. The very first shot of our video is that of a ticking clock - this is used to set the pace and location for the visuals, as well as allowing for an introductory shot to the visuals. We decided to include the diagetic sound of the clock ticking to emphasise the slow pace, as well as to create a comfortable, smooth transition into the beginning of the song, which we slowly faded simultaneous to the sound of the clock fading out.