Construction Post 6: Reflections on Edit Week 2

There was a lot to be done in week two despite the hard work we put in week one and the second week was more difficult than the first week of editing. There were now more shots that had to be incorporated into the final edit of the Seward Studio HQ shots and the ones of the hacker filmed at Alex's bedroom as well as the close up of the organisation worker holding a gun and the new shot of the hacker putting his hood up on the tube from the organisation worker played by Danya's perspective. These extra fast shots, e.g. the quick mid shot of an organisation worker holding a gun, allowed for a greater sense of continuity, so that our target audience could understand exactly what was going on amongst all the fast action they wanted to see.

As well as the new shots we had to cut length for and organise into the correct part in the sequence to keep continuity, we also had to work on the titles. We wanted the titles to suit the genre better and look slicker with a more complicated animation, which we made by dipping the previous shots to black to help improve the pace of the sequence and keep it looking slick and layering different animations together to find what looked the best. The titles suited the cyber-security element of the film with the colour inspired from 'The Matrix' with a font that looked like computer code font.

There was a continuity error when putting the re shoot of the new tube shot of the hacker putting his hood up inside the train, because in our other tube shot there were some people walking by close to the organisation worker sitting down at the platform the train was departing from, but we were able to cut shots in ways that would allow for this error to not be shown for the audience to critique, for we altered the order of which the shots came up so that the people who walked past were only in the final shot.

Another amateur error we made was in the shots of the hacker hacking at his home, for the reflection of the shotgun microphone could be seen in the shots of the hacker coding on his laptop. We found out that we could mask a part of the screen on top of the visible boom mic and then we edited frame by frame to make sure the contrast was right for each of these cropped masking squares we would place over the reflection of the boom mic and we changed the height and positioning, so that when some coding words came up on the screen, the mask wouldn't cover those letters either.

Before editing of the shot with the boom mic visible

After editing of the shot without the boom mic visible

There wasn't a real problem in terms of colour grading due to the fact that many of the shots took place indoors, where we were able to alter the lighting to suit the look of the film, e.g. what we did with the Seward Studio shots as well as the shots that took place in Alex's room with a basic lighting needed. However, we had to do some alterations to the contrast and lighting of the outside shots done for the running shots in order for the lighting to look the same throughout and make sure it looked slick and professional with an edgy look that suited the location.