Week 11: Assessment Brief, Edit Competition

In today's session Chris talked us through the assessment briefs.

Produce portfolio of work:

1) Non-synch drama exercise (Night Journey)
2) Documentary editing
3) Comedy editing

Research Blog (that would be this blog!) including screengrabs and evaluative report.

Note to self: make sure all links on blog still work prior to submission

We viewed the beginning of The Cutting Edge, a documentary about editing that features on the two disc edition of Bullitt.  From what I saw it looked really interesting.  I intend to find it and give it a watch.

The main part of the session was a competition to make a 90 second promo made of clips from a list of film and TV shows available to us.  The clip is to have a music soundtrack from a Sheffield artist and feature titles to promote Sheffield Hallam University.

The stages we employed to tackle this task were as follows:

- we gathered for a team meeting
- allocated roles of researchers and editors
- allocated films to researchers to avoid duplication of editing the same films
- music sourcing allocated to researcher
- I requested that as a way of editors knowing which section of clips to use, the title of converted clips to include start time
- the two editors took the clips to crop and arrange
- assemble
- rough cut

As one of the editors I assembled the chosen sections of clips, plus some clips that Bex and I decided to use (I chose, cropped and assembled clips in groups which had a similar theme, for example, fight scenes and dancing scenes).  To assist in this I devised a running order from 1 - 100 and and jotted down the name and type of clip I thought might work together and shifted them around as more clips became available or if I felt that they should be moved in the running order for better effect or if it improved the pace and flow.

The project started well but then we became a bit disorganised as a group but we did manage to achieve a quite good rough cut.  My sequence fed into the film really well.  I was particularly proud of the punchy (excuse the pun!) fight scene.

 This is my sequence of clips, sound not treated

I encountered a problem with the machine I was using half way through the session as it said the disc was full.  This is a recurring problem with our edit suites.  So I had to move to a different machine to continue working.


Feedback from Chris

Chris gave us good feedback and advice for working more productively which included; appoint a team leader / project manager, time manage eg, work backwards from deadline to give real idea of how much time is required for each job, treat different codecs and frame rates before importing and use zoom, close ups, split screens to eliminate idents.

It was a good exercise and I enjoyed the rush and quick thinking.