Editing session 3.

On the shots that were set in the past, we thought that it would work better if we were to put a different camera effect and or lighting effect. Callum looked through the camera effects and made the executive decision that none of them would look good on the shots after applying them all. I then looked at changing the saturation as well as brightness of the shots and after deciding with callum what worked best, I applied it to all of those shots that were set in the past, as if not there would be no continuity of the colour saturation in each shot making the end product look unprofessional. After this, I then attempted to add different jump cuts within the flashback, to an even further flashback point. This was done through the lighting editing technique that I used before in order to signify a flashback. There was then the use of quick shot lengths and the jump cuts being more frequent at around 2 seconds long. This proved difficult due to the fact that I had to get all of them the exact same length in time or else it would look disjointed but eventually I managed to do it and get the correct timing.

After this, I continued in the attempt to chronologically edit. The reason that I did this due to the fact that it gave me and Callum the perspective of what the audience would experience and how they would react to the video as time went on. Callum then continued to piece together the shots from the flash forward into the future and did the editing upon the first few seconds of the video by putting in the text that said the song's name and also we both talked about the ending and decided what looked best and ordered the shots within the editing software that we had. We both had a look and switched shots around seeing what worked and then in the end both decided what looked best. So far we had not put any fire into our music video, the purpose of this is that the fire is not an item but more so an entity and or body, with that being Alfie our main protagonist, it is the actions that he does that make him a firestarter more so than actual fires. We are yet to decide whether we actually include fire as we think that cut aways and other such editing techniques would be able to be harnessed fully if we were to include them.

Editing session 2

In the second editing session, I decided to put the different shots in order and began the editing chronologically, in order to sift out any problems, due to the fact that we could then see where the problems lay and which shots we were actually missing. it is through this that we found out that we were missing around 20 seconds of shots. This meant that we had to film extra shots of fire due to the song being 'firestarter' it would wrong not to do so. With this in mind, I continued to piece together my shots and then incorporated the flashback, which was in colour and decided to use a bright light fade in, due to the fact that it has the stereotypical connotations of being a flashback sequence entry point, which was a somewhat dreamlike fade which rippled. A bright light which blinded the screen and with the continuity worked well in order to make it flow from present to past. I attempted to make the editing for this as smooth as possible, due to the fact that the shots were HD unlike the present shots. The reason that the shots in the present day are blurry and unfocused, is due to the fact that when he lost the love of the woman in his life, his life and emotions became unclear and or distorted. It represents the loss of clarity that the protagonist has and works better when I put the black and white filter on it. The shots in the past were put together and i had to finely tune it in order to make it flow correctly. After this I continued on attempting to edit the scenes where there was the most singing, due to the fact that they were the most difficult as I had to get the continuity by matching the soundtrack which we had on there with the shots and sometimes audio was slightly off so I had to slow down one of our clips in order to make it fit with the song as our artist was singing too fast in the clip. Callum then inserted some more clips and attempted to add continuity and we both made executive decisions, looking over the clips and any changes that needed to be made, Callum cut the shots down and made them work by using the splice tool to his advantage and getting the most out of all of our shots

Editing session 1

We uploaded all of the footage on to Final cut pro X, which caused us some problems, due to the fact that many of the clips corrupted during the upload process when I connected the iPhone to the Mac. Callum and I then with the clips that we had put them in the order that they were supposed to go. I looked through the different effects with Callum watching over me and after much discussion we decided that it would look best if we were to put every shot in black and white due to the grainy nature of the shots as it was  dark. I then added the effect to all of the shots that were in Final Cut pro X. Callum downloaded the soundtrack from online and inserted it into the editing software that we had available. After that, I attempted to match the  lip syncing to the music, which I managed to do successfully for a few of the shots, while Callum did the same we evenly spread out the editing in order to allow us both to experiment with the editing software. After this, I went through applying all of the video effects on to our shots in order to see if there was anything better than the 'Black and white' effect that was put on our shots. After the application of all the different colour formats and effects on to the shot I decided that there were no better effects that would've worked. After this revelation, I continued, attempting to create some continuity in my editing by putting shots together and attempting to make them fit with our soundtrack, so that there was a match on action. This proved successful, by introducing the highest pitch shots, which were also in an interlude that was suspense building, so I included a shot where the lighter was being dropped during that scene to signify that it was the climax of the action during the music video.