Editing Process

I used imovie to edit my film. After shooting my movie for the first time, I got home and realised that the majority of the footage was unusable, because the wind was too loud and the dialog was impossible to hear. I tried for a while to over dub the voices with my friends, but that proved too difficult, so we filmed again the next week.


The first thing I concentrated on was getting the shots the right length in my film. Cutting them is easy on imovie, because you just move the little T bar thing and press apple T, which will cut the footage in half wherever the bar is. (First picture is scene in full, second is scene cut in half.)




Once I was happy with the length and flow of the scenes, I started focusing on the audio. I wanted music that would be appropriate with both the lyrics and the "feel" of the song, so I looked up domestic violence songs in google. My first two choices were Bad Wisdom by Suzanne Vega and I'm okay by Christina Aguilera. It took a while for me to get a hold of these songs, so in the mean time I used Turning Tables by Adele to fill in for both songs.

Once I got both the songs, I realised that Turning Tables actually fitted the ending of the film better than I'm okay. I liked the dramatic sort of feel it had, it seemed to drive the point home of my character being abused. The lyrics are also appropriate for the subject matter. "So I won't let you close enough to hurt me." Bad Wisdom talks about a girl going to the doctor's because she's been acting oddly and her mother thinks she's sick, but in reality she's been sexually abused. The music, by contrast is almost peaceful, which suits the beginning of the film which is innocent as my character bikes up her friend's driveway.

I wanted the music to fade at the right moments, so I went in the audio part of imovie and controlled the volume there. The volume is represented by little lines that move up for louder and down for quieter.

I found that in some of the scenes the volume was too low for the speaking. As you can see in two scenes in the picture above I doubled the audio to solve this problem.

Finally I decided on the freeze frame at the end of my film because I envision the next scene following Sarah's character at school, where she can't stop thinking about Molly. I think the freeze frame works because it leaves the viewer to see how Molly is feeling. Even though she acts angry at Sarah and blames here, she's really just scared. In the full length movie this would be the last time we'd see Molly for quite a while.

I also think the shot works well because of the framing in the background of the two trees.

I'm  annoyed about the camera work in this scene, because my tripod got stuck when I was filming it, which is why the pan upwards is incredibly shaky. We didn't have time to fix it though, because my grandma's gardener arrived just after we filmed this shot.