Category: Production

Week 11

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.

Week 8

We met on the 22nd at 8:15am, with the actors to arrive at 9:00am. This gave us 45 minutes to correctly prepare the camera/lighting, design the set, and for me to set up and test the audio equipment.

Our film is set at night time (hence the title 20:05), but the kitchen had large windows without any blinds, letting in lots of unwanted light and making the kitchen unusable. Our solution to this problem was to sellotape bin-bags to the outside windows, which blocked light from coming in and made it seem like night time.

The next day we met back up at 6:00pm to shoot 20:01, the scene of Jamie talking to Ben while walking home. I only encountered one problem on-set (or so I thought at the time), which was my struggle to remain hidden from the camera while recording. Unlike our filming inside (which allowed me to easily hide from the camera’s field of view), outside our character was in motion and the camera moved to follow him, consequently meaning I had to hide in-between cars and behind walls to best capture Jamie’s dialogue as he walked. In fact, in a few unused shots you can see my bright orange headphones poking out from behind a bush.

Due to us filming outside, my pistol-grip mic inadvertently picked up unwanted background noise. To counter this, I recorded Jamie’s monologue on a tie mic and also the atmos sound of outside, so I had the option to simply delete the footage’s audio and instead overlay both separate recordings, adjusting the tracks individually to find the right balance. In theory, my plan worked. However, it was only when it came to the assembly that I realised the tie mic had been rubbing against the collar of Jamie as he spoke, meaning all I had was the pistol-grip mic’s fuzzy and inconsistent audio. As a workaround, I’ve pulled small clips of audio from takes that we haven’t used in the film but that had clear sound, and stitched them together to form Jamie’s full sentences. This was a rather grueling process, and has taught me the importance of checking my recordings on-set where I can easily rerecord any poor audio.

I first started assembling the film at the end of this week, and throughout I tried to follow lessons I’d learnt from other established editors. One piece of advice that stood out to me in particular was from Eddie Hamilton (editor of films such as Mission Impossible and Kingsman) in an interview he gave to the film theory website So the Theory Goes. When discussing the editor’s influence on the audience, he stated that “the editor is manipulating the audience from the very first to the very last image. People want an emotional experience when they go to see a film, they want to be manipulated… so it’s very important we are aware of the power of that”. I found a way to apply this idea to a problem I had with the opening shot of scene 2, where Jamie comes into the house and takes off his hat and jacket. Our take of this dragged and overran massively, but it was the only shot I had of him coming inside, which was information important to the film. It was then that I remembered Hamilton describing the power of emotional manipulation on the audience, and I had the thought to briefly cut away to something else and then return to Jamie at a point much closer to the end of the clip, which manipulates the audiences sense of time to deliver a more streamlined sequence. I had b-roll footage of Beth sitting on the couch between takes, and after finding a short moment where she was staring in the direction of the door and appeared very angry, I had my emotionally impactful and manipulative cutaway. This brief insert primes viewers to dislike Beth, who’s sulky, dissatisfied demeanor evokes negative reactions from audiences, and makes them more invested in her psychological abuse of Jamie.