Editing Blog: Sound and Changes

The plan for this editing day was very similar to the previous editing day. The plan was to work on sound and make any changes needed to the film opening. I wanted to use the entire class time to finish the film; however, I ran into a laptop issue. The laptop I usually use for editing was almost dead. This doesn't seem like a huge problem because the simple solution would be to get a different laptop. It wasn't that simple though, when I started up Pinnacle Studio on a different laptop I realized that I had to re-import all the footage and music in order to edit anything. Importing the footage takes an extremely long time which means I wouldn't be able to get a lot of work done and would waste a lot of valuable time. To not waste time Leila and I sat on the floor next to the laptop cart, which is where the laptop chargers are and did our work on the original laptop. About halfway through the class, the laptop had charged to about halfway so I suggested we go back to our desk and do our work from there.

Before I started editing I watched the opening from the beginning to see what was finished. If I noticed any issues I pointed out to Leila who was writing down everything that needed to be fixed. The main issue I noticed throughout the opening was that it was extremely difficult to understand what the actresses were saying because either the actresses were too quiet or the music was too loud. To fix this issue I suggested to Leila the volume we should have the dialogue at because she had control over the laptop at the time. I also suggested that we should lower the volume of the music a little bit, but not too much so it wouldn't ruin the intensity of the scenes. When editing the music towards the end of the opening, I proposed to make the fade-in longer to have a better transition. Also, to have the music end abruptly to increase the seriousness and intensity of the Monitor being attacked. I helped to line up the 'bang' sound made when the Monitor gets hit to her dialogue. The dialogue that was used wasn't a complete sentence to make it sound like the 'bang' sound interrupted her and prevented her from finishing her sentence. This was extremely hard to do and it took me and Leila many attempts to get it right.

After all the sound was finished we asked a classmate to review it for us and if they could tell us if they could understand what was happening. The classmate gave us very helpful criticism on our opening. They informed us that the conversation in scene 3 was choppy and look displaced. Also, they recommended having the Monitor appear in more scenes for the audience to understand that the Monitor is friends with the spies. I fully agreed with this because I believed the story didn't make sense with the Monitor only appearing in two scenes, one at the beginning and one at the end. To fix these issues Leila and I planned to create new dialogue for scene 3 and re-shoot it and to add in more scenes where the monitor is present.

Closer to the end of the day, Leila and I realized that we needed to make a big change to our film opening. This change involved getting rid of the sub-genre, comedy. The original plan of this film opening was to be a comedy but before we started filming we changed the genre to action with the sub-genre of comedy. Now, we realized the comedy aspect of the opening doesn't work.

This is a picture of me editing the final task.