While I wasn't involved with the editing of Untelevised, I think it is important to increase my skills in editing. For this, I have made a short edit of a few of the scenes in the opening. If you haven't seen the rough cut of our opening yet, do so now by going to my last blogpost and watching it there.
At the end of the day, we used most of the footage we shot, trimming some of the shots down or making them longer to make them fit better. That was not in my domain, though, as it was the conscious choice of the editor, Max. One shot, namely the clicking of the rifle's safety, was put in an entirely different time slot to better accentuate the action. Most of the shots were used because most of them were necessary to string together the story.
I expected the editing to be much more tedious, actually, as I've had bad experiences with editing before. However, editing this was much easier. I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do, and I did it. I wasn't given some of the footage in the rough cut, so I had to start from the USB being shown and stop right as the firefight begins.
One of the things I learned was the importance of sound in constructing atmosphere and how to deal with sound. Through specifically distorting the music to make it sound more noisy and then lowering the volume of the sound when the camera cut to footage of the people walking in outside, the scene was automatically made more three-dimensional. I find that the upbeat tone of the music, contrasted with the less-than-upbeat tone of the scene (contrapuntal sound), creates somewhat of an intentionally humorous atmosphere.
In the rough cut, too, sound played a huge part in creating immersion within the world and continuity between shots. The cut contains a lot of noise that jumps up and down, while I tried to keep my volume (and noise) at a consistent level so the sound would feel fluid in between individual shots.
Something that can be noticed in my shot is a clear shadow of the camera in the first shot. I don't see that as being too much of a downside, however. I've also put in less cuts in general as a conscious choice - shots are longer due to the influences I've been receiving recently from older films.
Although there was a fair share of shot-reverse-shot in my cut, there was almost no match-on-action, which I really wanted to do. However, in the case of shot-reverse-shot, I think I did rather well.
One of the things which I'm mixed on is the use of fade-outs and fade-ins to emphasize the passage of time. I find that it looks jarring compared to the other cuts and reduces continuity between the shots. However, it does effectively establish the passage of time between shots.
Here is my editing timeline:
One useful skill I learned while editing is how to color grade. While I did use a bit of color grading while creating my logo, I found it to be much more useful here. I decided to put red mid-tones on the footage to emphasize the stereotype of Asian gangsters and make the lighting just a little bit warmer. I learned how to color grade here from a video by JustAlexHalford.
One thing of note is that color grading for low and mid-tones don't really work in this clip, as there is not really much of a distinction between them. I tried a lot of other colors, but I think red was the one that worked best. However, I honestly think no color grading would be better for the scene.
Here is the result of the above color grading:
Through trying to edit the footage's color, I've also developed knowledge about the built-in plugins of Vegas Pro 15, which are all very useful. I've learnt the usefulness of added plugins, too, as the default plugins don't really cut it for me.
Overall, making my own cut of the film opening was a really eye-opening learning experience to me. I now know more about editing and navigating my editing software than I used to, and I thus find it to be a much less tedious experience.
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