The action sequence:

This exercise I feel has brought out my tendency to over-edit and over complicate things when they can be done in a more simple and clean way. Watching my sequence back and comparing it to the others I saw from my classmates as well as the example we were shown, I think that in some ways it ended up being a bit jarring and convoluted. The process of simply turning on a stereo and playing a vinyl record was stretched into 6 different camera angles and a handful of jump-cuts in the middle even though the video goes for 27 seconds. It doesn’t flow as well as I was hoping and I found myself editing and cutting shots to simply fit the important bits into the 30 second time limit.

The audio was an aspect that I could have considered more carefully too as the Marvin Gaye song playing just kind of jumps about between shots and this shatters the illusion of continuity within the video which I think can really interfere with an audiences ability to engage with the work and in my opinion it just comes off as a bit sloppy, unless of course you’re purposefully using this kind of jumping to your advantage within the edit to create a desired response within an audience.

Another thing that I was unsatisfied with was the way that at certain points my phone camera refocuses momentarily. Along with the and jumps in the audio, I think that this is detrimental to audience engagement by being distracting and shifting focus (no pun intended) from where I was intending the center of attention to be on-screen. In comparison, within the example we were shown, I think that the simplicity and straightforward nature of what we’re being shown within those 30 seconds is a real strong point.

 

In-class editing exercise:

Working in a group in class and taking turns to edit shots from our classmates into little sequences was an interesting process. It showed me that you can come up with potentially infinite ways to put together a small handful of shots and along with this, different meaning and impressions can be created within the way that you cut together relatively simple shots. Some of the short edits we made were made to look ominous and somber while others could be humorous or surreal depending on the order and timing of events. I had a lot of fun in particular with shots of someone stealing a chair and found that playing with the cropping and post-production zoom can really highlight little details or actions within a shot that may not usually have been the intended focus. We also created a few sequences that made it look like someone else was deliberately throwing paper on the ground right next to a bin and then smiling to herself about it.

Another edit of the same few shots showed the development of paper throwing skills as she first filed and then succeed in her shot, and another just cut to the chase and showed her satisfaction in getting it in on the first try. Relatively menial things like a few people washing their hands too can be made to look like they’ve transformed into another person when cutting between two different shots from the same angle, it’s all about what you do with the footage in post production as to how you want it to be interpreted I guess, and this freedom is really fun even without any set vision of how you want to portray the characters or events within this footage. I think within this exercise I mostly aimed to take the given footage and make it look as funny or awkward as possible when played together within a sequence.