Long time no see... just kidding! Welcome back to another blog of mine, where I will be talking about editing for our film opener. Whew, my group has just finished recording all our scenes, and now comes the part where we have to put everything together. Today, we finished editing the first two scenes of our movie opener specifically.
The editing software we are using is CapCut on our phones. We first imported all the clips into CapCut, then adjusted the length of each clip or cut out parts of scenes that we didn't need. One example would be the establishing shot of the school, where it is shown that the students are walking up the stairs to class. The actual recording of this scene was almost 20 seconds long, but we did not need to include the actual full 20 seconds in our movie opener. Thus, we cut that shot into around 6 seconds.
As for the effects, we used a dark-tinted filter adjustment during the flashback scene so that the audience understands that the scene is a flashback and a memory, rather than the present. We also used a dark-tinted filter so that the scene could portray a sense of low-key lighting, where there are lots of shadows. This dark, atmospheric look allows the audience to also feel the slow death of Jahzara in the scene as if they were truly in the bedroom themselves. As for the other scenes, we did not add any filters and simply kept the visual of the scene as it appears on camera.
For transitions, we consistently used fades and dissolves to transition from one scene to another. For example, in our movie opener, there are three shifts between the beach scene and the flashback scene. To smoothly transition these scenes, we used dissolves. It first shows Raina, Emijola, and Ngoc holding hands at the beach and mourning Jahzara, then it dissolves to the flashback of us three walking into Jahzara's bedroom. It soon cuts to a series of jump cuts. To transition from us walking in to the jump cuts, we used a blur wipe. In other words, it is essentially a wipe transition, but the wipe transition is a blur that happens super quick. Then, it dissolves back to the beach scene, but of Emijola scattering ashes. Lastly, there is a dissolve transition to slowly cut from Emijola scattering ashes to the vase, flowers, and us (Raina, Emijola, Ngoc) walking away from the ocean.
Problems we encountered on this day of editing were that when we first put the clips together, it was choppy. In order to fix this, we had to try many different variations of the dissolve transition until we found one that was suitable. Likewise, a problem we had was deciding the order of the clips, as we were not sure whether we wanted the flashback scene first or the beach scene first. Since we couldn't decide, we ended up doing a mix of the scenes, meaning it is not that one scene finishes, and then we show the next scene. Rather, it is a constant transition between the two scenes through the use of dissolves as I said. As a result, the way we edited these two scenes makes the sequence our movie opener not linear or in chronological order of events. Similarly, another issue we had was with the alignment of the audio. Since we kept cutting between two scenes with two different background audios, it sounded weird as you would hear a mix of wave sounds and a mix of silent sobbing. To fix this issue, we made the audio of the beach scene more prominent so that the audience can hear the waves, and we dimmed the flashback scene audio. In both scenes, however, we added a song over it. Moreover, between the transitions from those two scenes, we made it so that each time it changes scenes, the audio will also fade in and out.
More importantly, Emijola and Jahzara are the main ones physically editing, whereas me and Ngoc are the ones who are consistently giving input and making the final decisions on the editing that they are doing. In other words, me and Ngoc suggested the specific plan for the editing, and Emijola and Jahzara put the ideas together. Every time they make an edit, they send it into our group chat, and I text back any input I have or changes I think they should fix. Then, they would fix or change it and send the edited version back. This process happened continuously.
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