Editing - Laura

Whilst editing there were many decisions we had to make as a group, and we also got help from the teachers, technicians and our audiences.

• One of the first decisions we made was to change the setting. The first time we shot the living room scene we did not get a variety of shots, so we planned much better this time and we also tried to get as much footage as posssible so that we could use more cuts in the scene, in order to inject some pace. we didn't get enough variety of shots. The first house scene was shot in my house, but when we did some reshooting we went to Charley's house for the living room part. The mis-en-scene was actually much better in Charley's house, as the furniture was much more modern and sophisticated, therefore it conforms to the type of character that we are aiming; which is already implied within her wardrobe. There is also dark furntiure, such as the dark wood cupboard, which implies a slightly sinister tone, as well as creating a modern edge to the decor. With the dark furniture, we also had high key lighting in order to make the room look more spacious, highlighting the cream and immaculate carpet. Also the sofa's are patterned therefore creating an old-fahsioned elegance, and the lamp is cream with a twisted metallic frame conveying an expensive quality (shot 1) Some of the examples where we wanted to add more variety were with the shot of me looking through the photo album. Originally, it was a long shot of the my back, as we wanted to conceal her identity. However when watchign this through we decided that we needed to see her emotion in order to understand the plot. Also, the close ups we used to convey this emotion added variety to the previous long shot. The furniture also allowed us to do different types of editing, for example we used match on action with the coasters in order to portray her need to have everything tidy.
• Another shot we redid was the cupboard shot. We had to change this four times. firstly, we did the shot and it worked well, except a member of our group had his head in the background, an obvious continuity error, therefore we had to use the crop on the effects to change this. Then, when we changed location we had to redo it. We though it had worked, except when we showed it to our teachers and others in the class, they said it was "too long". We needed to keep the frantic pace that she was looking, and also the cupboard is quite small and she is looking for one specific photo therefore we made it shorter, and used a closing the cupobard shot onto the title scene, which worked much better (shot 2) 
• After having our opening reviewed by the teachers, technicians and members of our class, they agreed that they did not understand that the baby belonged to the female character, and therefore did not undertsand her emotion. We were going to use photoshop in order to put my face onto an already existing picture of the baby and another person in the shot, however we decided as a group that it would be easier to take an actual picture and reshoot. Therefore, we organised a 'fake baby' prop and did this to make it much more realistic (shot 3).
• We also realised  that we needed to signfiy that it was the baby that she was focusing on. We did two things to convey this. Firstly, we altered our props and included the ballerina box, as this has childish and girl connotations, and it being in the cupboard showed she treasures it (shot 4). Secondly, one of the technicians suggested doing an effect of a babies laugh to make it seem nostalgic and as if it is in her head, perhaps taunting her. We looked on garageband to try to find this effect however, we could not find one that we felt really worked, and so decided to make our own foley effect. I laughed into a voice recorder, and we put this effect onto Final Cut. We then used the audio filters in order to alter the volume and pitch, and we also added an echo to ahcieve the effect that we wanted. 

• Another aspect of our opening which we had not planned was the music. We had decided we were going to use Frederic Chopins Prelude (and checked it was royalty free) to represent the female and the diegetic ballerina box music, however we decided to use the House of Leaves music whilst editing. We had help from other groups for this, we asked them to watch our video without music, then we played them different music from the royalty free website to see if they matched our genre. Many felt a bit too action thriller, but then we decided on House of Leaves as it was very intense, and added the non-diegetic drum as a group.