Editing Process - Assembly

As we were shooting scenes in non-chronological order, creating a whole solid assembly would have to wait until we had finished shooting the whole thing, however, at the start of this week and the last, I imported and labelled what footage we had already recorded and started to work with it and assemble it into a series of scenes in the sequence.

Labelling and sorting footage.

 I used the same techniques as I did on the 2 minute film in terms of colour labelling the footage for the different takes we did so I knew when it came to lining the footage up and creating a sequence, which shot was best. I also split the footage up into different bins according to which scene they belonged to just to maximise the organisation and limit confusion when even more footage came in. Last Saturday after we had done 3 of the shoots, I started to create an assembly of all the footage we had so I wouldn't just be leaving it all until later on and be overloaded with work.

Assembly of the Cemetery Avenue shoot.

Last Saturday's assembly.

As I was creating the assemblies for each shoot, I was looking through all of the footage and making sure it was all good quality, and that it would all cut together smoothly. If there were certain areas that didn't work in my opinion, or if we were missing a shot out of a scene, then I would communicate this to my director and see if we needed to re-shoot anything, or just work around it by cutting it differently.
During this process, I worked very closely with the director, Chris, to have a second opinion on where I made cuts in the rushes, as well as which take to use and finally to make sure the film is coming out how he wanted it too. We used the shot lists we created to make the labelling process even easier by just naming the files by their scene, shot and take numbers.

All footage completely labelled.

I followed the shot list as best I could when creating the overall sequence for each scene to see if it worked the way it was planned on paper, or if there was anyway it could be improved. I wasn't worried with the pacing to begin with as all I was doing was putting a very roughly cut shot after shot into the sequence. Making each shot work with one another was a priority however, as if they didn't, the whole narrative would suffer and we may run out of time for re-shooting.

Cutting between shots and checking the smoothness and continuity.

As I began to end the assembly, I noticed a few things that would have to be addressed in the rough cut and fine cut stages. Firstly, the length of the final assembly was almost 14 minutes long, which was way over the designated time limit we had for the film.

Final assembly of all the scenes.

As this was almost certainly due to the pacing and rough nature of the sequence, we weren't overly concerned with this factor, however it was a very big thing to think about in the rough cut stage.
Another thing I noticed was that the acting, especially in the beginning of the film, was very slow and made the scenes quite boring to view. This is another problem with the pacing which I will address in the later stages of the editing process, but it did cause concern as it meant we would most likely have to cut out a number of shots that could damage the strength of the narrative, or cause continuity issues.
Finally, especially in the clinic scene, there are quite a few differences with colour and the difference in lighting. This could be a real problem as if it looks like shots in the same scene are filmed at different times, it could ruin the immersion into the narrative for the audience and make the film difficult and unpleasant to watch. This is an issue I will solve in the fine cut stages of the process where I will spend a lot of time working through each shot and colour grading it to hide these problems.