There were some complications in organising this week’s reshoots, as Rebecca told us she was ill and couldn’t make it. But after some encouragement from our producer, she agreed to film for a few hours on the 11th of December at 3:00pm. This meant we stuck to an extremely strict schedule, and made sure we understood and planned every shot in order to use our time most efficiently.
During our reshoots we encountered a complication with the Zoom F4 where the audio would only record onto the left earphone. This was a huge obstacle, and threatened to derail our whole day of filming. However, because I had spent the time during pre-production to learn the intricacies of this equipment I was able to identify and fix the problem confidently and efficiently.
In some cases, the actors changed positions between takes which made for an extremely obvious breach of continuity when the clips were edited together. With this in mind, during the reshoots we tried to maintain the continuity as best as possible, with the producer taking pictures during takes to refer back to in later shots. Despite this, I thought that many of the film’s cuts still came across as fairly distracting and unnatural, and that there was more I could do to make some of my cuts feel even more seamless.
I’ve recently read about the method of seamless editing in Ken Dancyger’s book, The Technique of Film &Video Editing (2019, 6th Ed). He states that “Any action that offers a distinct movement or gesture provides an opportunity within a shot for a cut” (2019, pp,395). An example of the ‘matching action’ he describes is when I cut from a two-shot to a close up of Jamie. I had the actor turn his head at the end of the two-shot and at the beginning of the close up. This gave me a clear edit point to make between the two clips, and improved the scene’s fluidity and sense of rhythm. He also affirms that “A cut is a promise of more information or more dramatic insight to come” (2019, pp.399). My example adheres to this. At the point where Beth angrily asks Jamie why he was so late he sounds guilty and ashamed, literally turning to hide his face. This is a key moment in the film where the audience are made to sympathise with Jamie, and my editing tries to heighten this sense of emotion and drama by moving to a close up, which exaggerates facial expressions and makes the audience feel more connected to the character.
Just as we were finishing up for the day, I had the sudden idea to record a lengthy audio track of Beth’s initial cries. Where we had originally planned to have our quick-cut opening sequence play in silence, I thought that her alarmed and hysterical screams would add some much-needed emotion and energy to the static shots.
While comparing what we shot to our original footage, it became apparent there was an inconsistency. For our reshoots our camerawoman was unable to make it, so the director had to stand in for her role. He was unfamiliar with the camera’s complex settings and didn’t match the white balance to our previous shots, resulting in all of our reshot footage having a noticeable yellow tint. Although this was distracting and ruined any sense of immersion, we hoped it was fixable when it came to colour grading.
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