Editing - 'Body on the beach'.

Now that we had all our filming complete it was time to knuckle down to the editing. There was a lot to do and I was appointed main Editor!

As we loaded the rushes into Final Cut Pro, we logged as much as possible. We made sure we had a good idea of what takes we would use and which ones to scrap. We were immediately faced with a problem as we reviewed the footage. It appeared that the visuals and sound were out of sync by a couple of seconds. We tried to reload the footage but the same problem occurred. Unfortunately this meant we had to painstakingly re sync it all manually which took some time. Luckily none of the other footage had the problem.

I started to piece together the sequence which due to good logging and preparation was very straight forward. It was satisfying to see that the hard work on the filming day had paid off as we had plenty of shots to choose from. However, on some shots we made the mistake of not double checking them on the filming day. For example, the shot of the car driving past the woods seemed to be a perfect take on the day so we didn't redo it. As we went to edit the shot, we noticed Sam the Director was clearly visible! We had to use the scene so I used a zoom filter in Final Cut Pro to remove her.

The hardest part of the editing was the beach scenes. We were trying to put together a powerful film with a message, but the footage sometimes looked like it was a comedy! Also, as I mentioned on a previous blog entry, I really did struggle with the blowing winds on the beach. I overcame this by reusing some beach ambience we had recorded on the day. We needed to use some of the dialouge from the shoot as well, so I had to carefully mix the actors with the ambience and EQ out the wind as much as possible.

As the scene develops and we reveal the 'body' the family ignore, we flashed up some shocking images of war, famine and disaster. It was important as editor to choose the appropriate pictures and to display them at the most effective times.