POST PRODUCTION EDITING

After filming all of our footage, the most important element of our coursework came into play. Using the Final Cut Pro X (FCPX) software on the Macs, we edited both visual and audio effects, and finalised our film opening over a long period of weeks.

These are the main areas and tools of FCPX:

Of course, the first thing we had to do was choose our final clips and put them in order  across the editing time line. Soon after this, I added the film production company logo (Hammer) at the start of the clips, as it is best to add this before extra editing such as text and sound overlays, as the positioning in relation to the clips could be shifted after adding extra footage at the start.

The next thing we focused on was sound. As our film opening features no dialogue, sound is a highly important element for our final opening and we needed to work our way through various tracks which would be genre-appropriate as a generally overlay. We decided on these main sound clips, which we accompanied by sounds which would act as an effective jump scare sound, as we felt it was parallel to the urban drama aspects of the film opening, as well as building suspense as the opening draws out:

We also began to gather other sound effects such as footsteps and panicked breathing as the original audio from the footage was not as high quality as we had hoped it to be (-on the main day of filming, the atmosphere was quite windy so there was an excess of extra disruptive sound & white noise.)

I added sound clips at their relevant points, using the correction tool to speed up and slow down footage and/or sound so that they fitted realistically. Additionally, extra sounds and small music clips were placed in order to create extra suspense where necessary:

We then added transitions between various video clips to differentiate the separate time framed within the film opening. Instead of having ordinary jump cuts like the central sections of the opening, we used a fade-to-black transition, allowing the audience to infer that the time between the first section with the killer takes place before the sequence featuring the first victim.