This is an edit project that I worked on with footage that I licensed from
Editstock. Working on this project there are a number of things that I worked on to change or improve my editing workflow.
To begin the edit for this short film I read the script a few times before I had watched any of the footage. The first pass to get a feel for the story then the second time through I created a layout of some digital cards so that I could have a set of wall cards to see the rough layout for the short film. While the first pass of these didn’t necessarily reflect exactly what was shot this was my rough idea of the different beats of the short film and gave me a good idea of the different beats and actions in the script.
With an outline of what I think the script I then got all of my footage imported into Premiere and began to screen all of the footage and get it organized. During this process I tagged all of the media and put notes down about what I liked or didn’t like about certain shots.
An early set of some of my wall cards that I used for laying out the beats and edits for the project.
After watching through all of the media and putting some notes down about each shot I went through and pulled some stills from some of the shots for my wall cards. Since this script had a lot of different locations and scene changes this gave me a good way to get organized visually using only stills. I could then at a glance on my computer or iPad see the entire short film rough plan and I could start to move some of the shots around.
With my wall cards set up for the project, I began to sort through the media again pulling any shots that I like for a rough assembly. This doesn’t have tight edits at this point but is extremely rough but this gives me a sketch to begin to work from. Just like drawing I view this as getting something on the page to work from to get away from the “blank page” which can be sort of daunting.
Shot of assembly of sequence. Leaving gap in between scenes on the timeline at this point.
My next step is to just work on the timeline and the script and just start to trim down each shot and watch the cut in different sections and begin to trim down everything. I still go back to the media in the bin to determine if I do like the shots that I had selected initially. Once I am happy with the cut I will begin to work on my audio and for that I prefer to use Pro Tools.
Once in Pro Tools I like to get all of my tracks organized and just go through with an initial pass and get the dialogue cleaned up as much as I can. For these short there isn’t much choice between the lav mic or boom on the shots so you just get what is provided even though I could often see the boom in early shots and can tell when the lav is being used. For this particular short there were lots of issues in the sound with different noises happening on the tracks and I did what I could to get these cleaned and sometimes used different takes to try to get a cleaner sound but I could only do so much.
Getting audio organized in Pro Tools.
Some things that I struggled with while editing this short were the number of shots I had per scene. There were a lot of setups throughout the script and the story which limited the number of shots that I had access to in the edit. I don’t know for sure but I do believe that this was definitely limited on time to shoot which limited the number of inserts that were shot for certain things that I as the editor would have liked to have had for story purposes. That and things like more close ups in certain moments in the short but those are things that as an outsider I have no input or communication with decisions that were made. That is editing in a nutshell I know but without some other options editing this felt very linear in the number of options available.
Other than that, as I mentioned above with the audio which I know is just part of how the files are delivered is it would be nice to have access to both lav and boom microphones. Overall though I really enjoyed working on this project though and it was great practice to get some narrative practice in with a bit more of a drama focus.
