Construction Post 24: Reflections on Edit Week 1

During the first week of editing, our priority was to get all of the footage down onto the timeline, along with the soundtrack, and edited together as tightly as possible to see whether a back-up shoot was necessary.

Below is our edit week 1 schedule

As a group we decided that we would need to do a back-up shoot very early on during the week due to some obvious errors that we saw, such as the lighting kit being seen in one of the shots and the lipstick on the glass. The red herring sequence was another reason because, as well as the differences in the distances between the runner and main character from shot to shot not being realistic, the shot that had both characters' feet in ruined the suspense that we were trying to create as the audience found out too early that the person following Shania wasn't the stalker.

Group editing session

After having a group discussion and getting our teachers' opinions, we decided that to make our red herring sequence work we needed to keep the mystery of who was fallowing Shania a secret for longer than what we had originally planned. We also needed to think of a way to have Shania be more unaware of her surroundings as otherwise, in reality, she would hear the footsteps way before the runner had the chance to bump into her. 

To fix these issues we decided to have Shania on the phone as this would realistically make her unaware of her surroundings and help add to the tension as the audience knows more than she does. We also included two POV shots from the runner's perspective to make it seem more like the stalker was the one running after Shania. We also tightened our framing up for the bump so it wasn't until the wide that the audience find out that it was just a harmless runner coming up behind Shania rather than the stalker.

Aside from the issues we picked up on during the edit, I was very happy with how it was all going at the end of week one, as we had a clear plan of exactly what we were keeping and what needed to be redone. We were also a lot closer to the time our opening was supposed to be, even with the issues in the end sequence.