Evaluation Preliminary Task - Editing

I found the task of editing a very fun and exciting one; using new effects and tools i had never used before. I was also using a new editing program, Adobe Premier Elements 3.0. The program i usually use to edit videos and other relevant media at home is Windows movie maker. That program is a lot more basic, so using this new program, Premier Elements 3.0 was a brilliant experience, using a much more advanced, professional program, which gave a more advanced, professional finish, which is just what we wanted. We wanted, as much as possible, to use continuity editing, whereby our transisitions and effects were subtle and un-noticed but added diversity and variance to our sqeuence. In the process of filming we used a technique know as "Shooting for the edit" whereby we just shot loads and loads of footage, using different camera angles and techniques. This meant it made editing a lot easier because we had a lot of material to work with. Because we had a lot of footage of the same things, it meant we would ecperiment with what we had, adding zooms, pans, fades etc. to find the best, most effective finish. In our editing, although i actually "did" the editing, there wa a lot of group input to see if what i had done and if we, as a group, liked it. we then gave feedback on what we had seen and then thought about different ideas and how things could be changed to give a better effect. As a group we made the following changes:-

>We had a cut which seemed very sharp and abrupt which we didn't like. We then added a fade to make it more smooth, and flow better. The sequence was a very relaxed one without much tension, so adding choppy, sharp cuts wouldn't have worked as well as a smooth flowing cut.

>The final clip in the sequence was Jess leaving the meeting, and the sequence being over. We thought that instead of having an aburpt ending, we would fade it out, therefore signifying the end of the sequence.

>At points, there were long sections with very little in the way of things to view. For example, at the start when Joe enters the shot through the door and sits down. We thought that this was quite long and boring as there was nothing really happening. We decided that we would cut to a shot of Jess greeting him. This therefore broke up a boring, pointlessly long clip, into one which introduced Jess. We also thought that this would be a good idea because if we were to see Joe walk in and sit down, we wouldn't have seen if anyone else was there yet. therefore confusing the audience some what, possibly making them thing "where did she come from?".

>We also thought it would be a good idea to add some background noise to our clip. To do this, we had a nice clip, which we hadn't used for some reason, which had some background noise of some people in a class room some distance away. we thought it would be quite good to have this noise in the background as a diegetic sound as, although it may not be imediately apparent to the audience, the sequence has been shot in a school corridor, so the audiences generic expectations of a sequence shot in a schools corridor would be some banterful noise of young people in the background.