Editing: 15th December 2009

It was not easy getting used to Adobe Premiere but I guess if you sit there experimenting nearly every tool and pressing buttons that look like they are going to do something really does help understand the programme. In the short space of time that I had, I spent learning how to use new and unusual tools in Adobe Premiere. I dedicated a whole day, from 10:30am - 3:00pm editing the footage that we filmed. I enjoyed it, but found that my eyes were twitching out of tiredness towards the end.

I started off by sorting the footage out in chronological order. I did this with the help of the storyboard but found that we made a few changes along the way. I also tried to focus on the main protagonist of the movie being Elizabeth in the state of exorcism (Her mother's spirit). The aim is to keep the viewer guessing but also highlighting the theme of the story. I think my main concern at this point of time was that we had to create a teaser and not a trailer. I had to narrow down the best of the footage that we had to make it as effective as possible.

Back to the editing process, I found that the timing of each shot was very important. I speeded up the establishing shot, being of Elizabeth praying to her mother's picture. This creates a frigtening effect as we did one extreme to another; slowing the shot down as she opens her eyes which appear to be ghostly white. The shot then immediately goes on the birds flying across the sky upwards. This denotes disruption to normality. This shot was also filmed out of curiosity, just to see how it looked on camera. Who knew that we were actually going to include this shot in our trailer. Between every shot I put a video transformation, this was called 'dip to black,' it created fluency throughout the trailer.

The scene of Elizabeth walking towards the camera was edited and re-edited several times. I wanted this scene to look a frightening as possible so I decided to to mix the shots of the handheld shots of running in the forest and Elizabeth walking in towards the camera. I also maximised the speed of the shots to about 300% to make it look abnormally quick and more sudden to shock the viewer.

Our own trailer was beginning to freak us out.

I will continue blogging about my 'editing' experience in a short while.