Backwards editing and practice shoot

This is what happened after our practice shoot for my upcoming drama project "A short Story in Brutality"

We did the practice shoot yesterday, we didn't get a lot done, it ended up being a little bit of experimenting and a little bit of a reccie as we didn't have a woman to act and Christie and Joe couldn't come.

As it is only a practice shoot I thought I might as well edit it myself and document what I do to help Amy out when she is editing. First I learned how to turn images black and white and reverse them. This is reletively simple with the speed control (right click the clip) and with the image control effects. I then looked at two similar shots from the day to compare their quality, one was taken in black and white (left) with the monochrome setting on the camera and the other was grey scaled in post (right).

To me it seems like the converted greyscale is better quality however I have another example.

In this shot I actually preferred the clip taken in b/w however after altering the contrast on the other clip it looked better. It is however not as good a take in general even if the film is to be converted to b/w in post for this exercise I am going to use the clip taken in monochrome. On the bright side the blood is really easy to see which is excellent! The shot comes across really nicely, when we consider the framing a little more and set the shot up a little better with lighting im sure it will be brilliant.

Another thing I learned or had confirmed in the edit is that the two "stalking" shots we had took up a lot of time, although they are not final and would be tighter we planned on having a few other too, at the moment they already take up a minute!

Finally I discovered that it is really confusing to edit a scene backwards, especially the fight scene which relies on continuity. I suggest when we edit the final project and rushes that we edit them forwards first and then reverse the whole film at once, reversing parts on separate time lines to review it as the process goes on. This is simply because of how confusing it is to backwards edit something.

I have a lot of images from the day too, I will upload and talk about the day in general soon.
Here is the final experiment/ practice.

Whilst it is a little dodgy you can clearly see a lot of the scenes, stalking, the fight and washing the hands. The fact that they all work backwards has given me the confidence to go ahead with the full film and the shot by shot planning will be done soon.