Editing our Thriller ~ Post production

The key decisions I made were mostly narrative, or style related. In total, Ive probably clocked more than 8 hours of editing. Initially, I thought the editing process would be relatively simple, and would take around 5 hours maximum. However, when I saw that we had over 17 minutes of raw footage, I realized that it may take longer than this. The preliminary task only took around an hour to edit, and so gave me a false expectations as to how long our thriller would take. The intended outcome of this process was to create a captivating and engaging action-thriller opening sequence. 

We used Adobe premiere pro to edit our sequence, and used audio network to source our music. In our first session we reviewed all our raw footage and selected certain shots. We did this because there were some shots that were unusable e.g. if nothing was being framed, or if there were other (non cast members) in the shot). The timeline was very useful to our editing, as it allowed us to organize shots and diegetic sound and make the rushes align longitudinally. For our most useful shots, e.g. our shot of the entire sequence in one take, were named, so we could find them easily, and know which shots were which on the timeline.



In our second session we began cutting and cropping our shots. We did this because of the nature of our thriller: action, required quick-cut shots. Additionally, not entire clips were useable, e.g. a non-cast member contaminated the shot, or a cast member looked at the camera. 

Continuity was definitely our biggest obstacle. It was very challenging moving from one shot to the other, or conveying a change in location. Utilizing the software on Premiere Pro, we were able to line up our shots, so changes in angles looked seamless. 

We utilized both special and practical effects. For all of our gunshots and impact of those gunshots, we used special effects. We used fake blood for our death scene to make it look more realistic. We also used flash and smoke grenades to create real smoke and one small explosion. The smoke grenades were incredibly effective. They added a significant amount of realism to our thriller and made the shots look beautiful. One particular example is below, which I personally think is a stunning shot. 

We placed in a large amount of sound effects. We started with background noise: ambient gunshots and explosions. When then moved closer to the foreground: the sound of the Russian's gunshots. Finally, we placed in the immediate gunshots. This created a holistic soundtrack, which implemented all the sounds one would expect from a real-life battle sequence. We used dozens of different gunshot sounds, and a range of noise, such as tanks rolling or mortars shooting. We then finished by adjusting the sound of the dialogue, making it uniform and normalizing the volume.  Below is the sound file from our thriller, so you can hear the sounds for yourself. 

The special effects was the most time-consuming out of the whole editing process. For the few seconds of special effects; muzzle flashes and blood squirts alike, took several hours. We put in several special effects using Adobe After Effects. We put in muzzle flashes, to make the firing of the guns more realistic. We placed blood squirts and splatters to make the impact of the bullets seem more realistic. To cover up some of the production crew that were in one of the final shots, we added fake white smoke. The special effects were tedious, put definitely move our thriller from looking amateur to some-what professional. 

Once everything had been completed, we added our titles. We used three titles: one studio name "JCJ Studios," one production company "A Tao original Production" and the title "Latency." We used standard white text, which we placed in the middle of the frame. For the title howevever, we edited it to make it appear as if it were flashing, by cutting the title card over and over during its appearance. We paired this with non diegetic sound of a electronic siren, which also was cut in concordance to the title. Here is how the title looked after doing these changes: