Through editing I tried to make the narrative as fast paced as possible. I wanted to do this by using lots of cuts for lots of different camera angles. In the end I didn’t manage to achieve this very well as I didn’t have enough footage to work with. Instead what I tried to do was to build suspense within the sequence by having some long duration shots before the climactic fight sequence at the end of the sequence. In the end I think that this worked out quite well but I think the original idea would have been a lot better.

As a group we developed the narrative and characters in our sequence. We started brainstorming ideas and settled on one we all liked. Myself, Harry (cinematographer) and Lewis (director) all began to talk about mise-en-scene and how we thought it should look whilst Ali began looking at sound. We worked on a storyboard and settled on a location and characters.

Originally we wanted to make a fast paced sequence and also for it to be a little longer than it was at in the end. However we did have major hindrance in our shoot. When we got to the location to do our shoot we found we had been given a camera without a battery. This meant that Harry had to travel back to the college to get a battery. This cost us lots of time we could have been shooting and also meant that, as editor, i didn’t have as much footage to work with. One particular problem with the editing was shot of the character walking, where two takes had been done that overlapped when we wanted one continuous shot. This meant i had to use a fade to show passage of time, but it didn’t look very good.

I wanted the audience to look at the editing and think that I had done well to create suspense within the sequence. I don’t think that this was the case in the end however, because it doesn’t really fit in with the story of the sequence and doesn’t seem to be the right way the story should have been told. This wasn’t what I originally wanted to do however and I think I managed to do well with what I had.

The feedback for editing said “some of the shots were too long; the fight scene was well edited.” This shows that the choice of long durations shots obviously wasn’t a very good choice. But in the end there was nothing I could do about this as I could only do the best with what I was given. I am pleased to see that the fight scene editing was well received because I did make the decision to go back and re-edit this. When we looked at the original rough cut I thought that it wasn’t fast enough and didn’t look very good so I went back and re-edited it. This of course meant that the clip was quite a bit shorter but I am pleased with this decision.

I chose to be editor because I felt confident with the Final Cut software and thought it was something that I was particularly good at. I think my skills enabled me to do better in the end as I knew what I was doing. I do however really feel that the sequence could have been a lot stronger but due to the lack of footage I did what I could. If we had had more footage, which wasn’t any fault of ours, I feel that I could have done a lot better.