A Short Story in Brutality Editing day 2

Here is what happened on the second day of editing A Short Story in Brutality

We worked for a good full 6 hours to get the edit finished but after the long tiring stint working we were happy and exhausted. Right from the start we had similar problems to the day before, too many cooks, ling times spent on discussion rather than editing and missing footage. We found a lot of things we didnt think we had, labelling would have solved this, and realised we hadnt shot a lot of things. Another problem was that we had shot things but quickly and on the fly, not adjusting lighting or giving the shots the time they deserved, because we were behind schedule, as a result we couldnt use a lot of conceptual stuff that we really loved but looked horrid.

After a few hours we finally had something close to a fine cut so we reversed the footage. This took a while because of a mess up with sequence settings and rendering but eventually we could see the piece in its intended chronology. As I had hoped, and expected due to practice footage, it pretty much all worked backwards! Everything but the fight scene really...

One of the hardest parts to edit, as expected, was the fight scene, the fast pace and reverse editing was really tricky and confusing. Because of the nature of punches they are faster on the way down than the way back, this took the impact out of the blows and the scene. We were puzzled and debated playing with the speed of clips a lot or cutting it really violently but in the end Amy's simple suggestion of playing some of the footage forward was the best idea. So we carefully played some parts forward and kept others backwards for continuity's sake and because some of them just still worked! In the end to a standard viewer we dont think it will be obvious that some are forward, the action is so frantic and short it is impossible to tell for sure.

Amy then took a well deserved break and Jordan really got eyes on some footage he hadnt seen, after a lot of reviewing he found a few shots he preferred in the piece and discussed them with me and Christi, we all agreed and the changes were made for the better. Amy didn't like them... majority rule rang out and I think for the better. After a little more fine cutting the audio was ready to go on.

As our audio is slightly unusual for the project it didnt take long to sync the sound, most cues had been met in the writing of the audio and already matched. After playing around a little and arguing over a hilariously bad piece of audio that I argued down in the mix (I would have preferred it removed) we exported ready to slap it on a disk and present it the next day, Job Done!