Editing Schedule

After I finished filming I decided to straight away start to edit as this would be the most laborious task and yet the most important. I wanted to use final cut pro and this was located at school on the macs however I find that I work better at school and after I started to edit the beginning titles I decided that it would be easier for me to try and do it on my macbook at home. The only problem with this was that I only have iMovie which didn't have as many tools that I could work with. I have editing something on there before so I know that it wouldn't be the best application to use when it came to edit my shot film. Therefore I looked at final cut pro and found out that it was quite expensive and I was not willing to pay the price when I could essentially do it at school, however it came to my attention that it had a 30 day free trial in which I could edit my short film and upload it. This was what I have now on my laptop and what I am using to edit all of the clips together. Final cut pro is the best way to edit my short film as it has lots of different effects, sound effects, titles and different but easy ways to put the different shots together.

I decided that the first thing that I must do was to have a look at all of my different videos and upload them all to my computer so they are saved and then I can look through them and get rid of the ones that are not up to standard and are maybe bloopers, it will then allow me to work with the ones that I have left and I can then put them in order. I find it best to put the shots in chronological order first before cropping and cutting them as it is harder to try and find the shot that you want within another 100 videos. This will be the first thing that I will do and then I can go onto edit them together. I have all together about 60 videos which I will try to add in the short film, even just some small snippets from each one because they have taken time to try and shot.

The next thing that I will do will be cutting them together and finding which parts will be best to use as well as looking at which ones would work well together, whilst I edit these I will jot down notes on what I need to do with the individual shots as they may need different colouring or sound effects. After I have cut them I can then go onto putting the transitions between them all. I don't want anything that is too extravagant like the 3d rectangle or arrows etc, I want to try and use only the natural ones that I can then blog about in my editing log. 

I also then need to look at the titles of my film as I can then see the length of my short film and how much more I need to edit it down to. As I have decided on having old photos of my protagonist for the beginning title I need to find something that works well, I didn't really want the edit to stop for a blank background I wanted to have a picture of my actor now and then have some text over it. But at the end I really want a stereotypical credit which might take a couple of seconds. I will edit these and out the words that I need on them.



Penultimately I will listen to some music and then attach it to the shots that need it, there are already some sound effects on final cut pro so I will have a look at some of these to make sure that I have some diegetic sound. A lot of the music that I will use will have to have no lyrics because of the audio which will also have to be put on before hand as it is a voice over, there is garage band on my mac I will try to use it to put something together however I am not going to promise anything from it. A lot of music that I have already looked at is on a free website online however they are all different to what I want so I will have to play around with the music side of things to try and adapt it for my short film.

Lastly I will have to look back through my editing and check if everything looks clean and if it all makes sense. After getting peoples opinions and feedback I can go back through it and change the parts that need tweaking and look through other videos that I could use instead.





As there are only 30 days on my trial I will have to try and do all of the editing within that time and make sure that when it is finished there is nothing to change.

I will start the trial on the 1st of december as I had already completed some of the beginning on the macs at school so I thought that this would be a very good time to do it. As there is a school holiday I have plenty of time at home to get the short film finished.

1st december - Look through all of the footage and delete the things that I will not need
3rd december- Put all of the footage in chronological order
4th december- Edit some of the clips together
6th december- Edit the rest of the clips and start colour correcting
7th december- Try to make sure the transitions are clean
9th decmber- Start looking at music and the different sound effects within final cut pro
10th december- Add the music to the clips that I have already
13th december- make sure that all of the titles and footage has been edited together correctly
15th december- Look at the final footage and ask some feedback from what I have done
17th-30th december- Look back and do any editing that I need to complete to make it the best that it can be!!

Conventions of short film posters

There are differences between a feature length film poster and a short film poster some are similar however. When researching short film posters is was hard to find the differences between the two, but when looking closely there are certain elements that can be seen on all short film posters. They are both created using the same editing technique so they both look professional and more authentic. The film posters are what the audience sees first so this attracts them to watch the film, most short film posters have less information on them, a feature length film poster sometimes has a tagline which gives some information away as they have so much detail that it will be easier to understand. It does have a title and a billing block, whereas a feature length film usually has a release date as well. Some short film posters have a screen shot of a picture from the film whereas a feature length film usually has a photo that has been taken specifically for the poster and in a famous location. As short films conventionally have limited characters the bill block will be smaller than usual, in addition the fonts can tell the genre. 

colour correction

I have had to upload this blog post as images because I used word and if I copied it straight onto blogger the font would change so I have print screened them and uploaded them as images. 

Different types of Short film

Although there are various genres of short films sometimes they are made to show a certain incident or event that occurred, or to establish a particular story or thoughts.

• Romance (plots that follow the focus of passion, lust and emotion, usually allows the audience to follow the characters journey for love)
• Comedy (light hearted dramas and can sometimes be humorously dark but are used to make the audience laugh)
• Sci-Fi (often set in futuristic environments that show advances in technology and special effects)
• Drama (often portrays real life situations and based on real people and often used to show humans in their best and worst light)
• Animation (the use of stop motion cinematography or hand drawn to tell a story of any kind)
• Horror (created to scare and terrify the audience)
• Documentary (non fictional, factual works which are mainly narrative based)
• Film noir (is not specifically a genre but rather the mood, style, point of view and tone of a film)
• Action (designed for audience escapism and often have fight scenes, stunts and continuous action that is fast paced due to editing techniques)
• Historical (based on past events)

Research into castaway on the moon

Castaway On The Moon was a film that inspired my short film, I have decided that I will need to research this film more as people might think that it is odd to have a film from a different country. I watched this a couple of years ago with my brother who had currently lived in South Korea and I asked how the different media in Korea were. He offered to watch this with me as he suggested that I would like it, and I did.

After failing to kill himself by jumping off a bridge, the man is washed up on a sedated island in the middle of the river, but within view of the city's high-rises. He attempts to escape, but soon accepts his fate and the challenges in living on the island. A reclusive young woman, who takes close-up shots of the moon and has not left her apartment in years, spies him on the island and comes to think of him as her own alien.

When it came to thinking about different ideas for short films I thought it would be easier to use influences from feature length films. The only international film I have seen is this so it always sticks in my mind, the different story lines in the film are very clever and choosing one to be similar to my short film was hard but I think that it makes a very good short film.

The isolated girl in the film was a part that I thought I could adapt to make it work for my own short film, the only issue is as they are a high budget film the set is able to portray her life and her lonely way of living. As I do not have a lot of money to spend I will have to try and adapt the storyline through the use of camera angles and editing as it is hard for me to dress the room in such a way that they did.

I will most likely watch the film again so I can have a look at the room and the short clips that allows the story to come together so I have a better idea of how to edit the short film. 

Below is the trailer so you have an idea of what the film is like and a clip of the female protagonist which I am looking at.


   

Organisation of actors, costume and props, locations

I need to think in detail about the different costumes and props that I will use, the locations that I need to study and perform a REECE on also I need to organise my actors.

I decided to use my actor that I used for my as media, she was very helpful and said that I could use her house as well which was easy to get too as it is 5 minutes away from school and my house. It was ideal for my short film as it is located at the front of the house and so I can film outside on to the street. Also I needed her to have a small room as it allows the audience to see how she is isolated and lonely, the small room however is difficult to film and the lighting makes it harder to try and get the continuity editing correct.

The different locations make it easy to film as they are all close together so organising it will allow me to look at the different locations in detail and see if they are ok to film. As Noel my actor lives 5 minutes away from the park near school it could be easy to film there and I know that other students from school have used that location so I will be able to use the park. The only thing about this is that I will have to do a detailed health and safety check on the park and other people could be there at the same time which would make it harder to film. I will not use any other locations as it is about a student in a confined space so filming in a lot of locations will not make the story clear.

I talked to my actor to see what times I could film her, before I started we made a timetable however she recently got a job so every time I can film I have to check with her first as otherwise I will turn up and she will not be there. When I have media lessons she has free lessons so I have quite a lot of free time to film.

As she is alone the costume has to be quite casual and maybe even slobby. Her hair will always be up, her face will have no makeup because she does not have anybody to impress. During the dream scene I might get her all dressed up with her hair down and her make up done as she is dreaming about her favourite things and how she wants to be. The other girl who she sees could be dressed in her clothes as a child in the photos or something similar. I have had difficulty trying to get the costumes to be the same for the continuity as Noel has sometimes not got the clothes that we have had before so she has worn something different, I have got around this by her falling asleep so the clothes can be different. 

I have not got a lot of props in mind as there is nothing that I need to have ideally because she is stuck in her bed room. I will probably have a laptop, a book and things that a normal girl will have to keep her occupied.