Lessons Learned 5: Editing

TL:DR – You can remake the film in the edit… If you have to!

Because I knew I was going to edit the film I was reasonably relaxed about the shots while shooting. I knew what I had written and what I was shooting was going to allow me to come up with something. I definitely shot things with an eye to the edit.

The edit process, for me, started during the writing of the short. I knew we were going to be making a short, and I knew we had no budget, so mentally I was editing what I was writing to something I felt we could achieve. Since I had decided on the location before starting to write, this process was reasonably painless.

Similarly, when story boarding things, I knew what b-roll, inserts, cutaways is would need and so everything was planned ahead of time on an excel spreadsheet.

The spreadsheet is shown in the image accompanying the post!

All went well until I first reviewed the footage. As mentioned ad nauseam in the previous “Lessons Learned” posts – I totally screwed up the framing on the first scene of the day – and only found out when playing it for the first time. I confess, Patrick and myself laughed our heads off – a two shot with no one actually in it!!

For a while I was demoralised. Something that stupid on a small production like ours was a pain in the ass but at least we could have re shot the whole thing when RJ was available again, but we didn’t want to – we set out to make the film and I was going to finish it, even if it was a complete disaster only myself and Patrick would ever see.

So we picked our shots, converted the footage from RAW and twiddled our thumbs for a while…

Time to get on with it and see what I could cut together. I always knew I was going to be editing in Final Cut as I was planning on using it for a short documentary we were filming for the local council on wildfires. I duly borrowed my wife’s credit card (!) and purchased it from the App Store!

This was my first time editing in Final Cut Pro X. I loved it! I got it straight away! It’s about the story… Forget you’re editing and tell the story! For the first time in ages, editing felt like fun again. I wasn’t sure about how to do some of the small things I wanted to, but, hey, that’s what DuckDuckGo is for 😉

On doing an assemble edit – more or less just throwing the master shots onto the timeline – I realised that we still had a short film on our hands; luckily all of the other shots were frames reasonably well and the mountain shots that were the main backbone to the film, proved to be exactly as planned. Yes! We were going to have something to put together…

What was clear was that the mountain scenes worked, the party scene worked, the house scene and the cabin scenes worked!

What didn’t work was the office scene. This scene was dialogue heavy and our (expensive) location just didn’t look special and so it was time to cut most of it out. On looking at the footage I realised that there was something I could do…

Since the flashback scenes were the main character’s “memories” I realised that memories are very rarely photographic, I could select just a few shots to present a shortened version of the scene… Most of the dialogue had to go…

I discovered that dropping the dialogue freed me.. In a film this short I was better showing rather than telling… There were shots I didn’t need so they were out! I very nearly went all the way and made it into a silent film! Patrick advised against and wisely so!

Everything else moved very quickly after the decision to remove the dialogue. The scenes fitted together as planned.

Again, Final Cut Pro X made the process reasonably painless and very quick. I was afraid to get started, but once underway things only took a day or two before I was ready to send a rough edit to Patrick for his input.

The first, five minute long edit, (for the My Rode Reel competition) was too short… Patrick and I laughed because it felt like RJ runs up the mountain… It was too short, too quick… So I added some stuff back in and the six minute version was almost spot on. It felt right.

A bit of polishing and discussion and we were very nearly finished.

As George Lucas has proven, however, sometimes things are never quite done…

Yes, I’m going to to be doing a quick re-edit for a local film competition and will add a scene and some of the dialogue back in. Hopefully that will be the finished version… (Special edition? Lol!)

Next time: Lessons Learned 6: Sound