Editing my video: Stage 1

Now that I has the sufficient amount of footage to create my entire music video, it came round to editing together along the direction of my practical production treatment to piece together my intended  idea for my music video. As I have discussed previously, I wanted my footage to play in reverse within the scenes, so the whole video goes backwards in time, however, editing it this way would not be very simple. Instead I decided to edit each scene individually in normal time, which I would then go back and reverse once I had completed all my editing.

I wanted most of my scenes to be influenced with continuity editing, so the actions flowed and time passed normally within the scene, between the different camera positions and shots I used. This meant lining up the shots sometimes took a lot of attention to get smooth transitions between the shots. This specifically became an issue in the cheating scene where the main guy runs up the stairs:



 

I wanted a variety of angles that not only created variation in shots but refered to the change of power within the scene once he opened the door.

 

There was a certain shot in this scene where I also wanted to position the audience in the point of view of the main guy when he first opened the door. When filming I moved the camera stepping forward into the room rather than just stationary:

 

 

Seeing his reaction and then seeing the action from his point of view added variety in shot type and puts the audience in the position of the guy, to feel the same emotions he would when opening a door to this.

 

These two shots and most of the scenes throughout the video were created through extensive use of the trim tool, as well as editing the length of the footage in the left preview screen against the right screen. This way I could have the same action in two different camera positions parallel to each other, which I could cut down so they switch viewpoint of the action so they flowed into each other and kept continuity in time.

Editing each scene in this manor widened my skills in continuity editing, as well as the different functions on Premier Pro. Even though all I did was simple cropping of my shots, compiling them to flow in a natural way was hard work, and now I feel more informed on how to do this to create realistic looking scenes. This way when I change it round to play backwards, the motion should flow with the exactly same effortlessness just in reverse.

Now I have got to the stage of having each scene edited in order, yet reverse in the flow of narrative. Although I intend to reverse the whole video so even their motion is backwards, I like how it is looking at the moment with the different scenes still moving forward in time. I will consider this as I move forward in my editing process, maybe creating two versions of my video to compare.