Editing 4 By Joanna Crook

Opening Scene We took several different shots of this one piece of film in order to get the case file to land in the centre of the frame and to make sure that the contents did not fall out of the folder when it hit the table. It was this piece of film that I decided to start with.

In order to make the scene more interesting and flow from one shot to the other I place a shot of the interviewer turning on the voice recorder between the two shots of the interviewer talking. This helped to create more of a variety to this very short scene and enabled the audience to fully understand what is happening. I allowed this clip to go on long enough for the audience to be able to see the time beginning to count up.

Ending Scene We tried to film the ending in many different ways but in the end decided to shoot the whole ending as one shot. This enabled us to slowly reveal Charlotte in a strait jacket and then allow the camera to tilt downwards and reveal what the interviewer has written on the page of the case file.

Over the ending scene I started to think about what music I wanted to place over the top of the scene. I decided to use the juke box music that I used in the scene before. This helped to emphasise the creepy childlike nature that Charlotte has at the end and show her increasing madness as this music was used to symbolise the ghost. Also at the end during a blackout I placed the dripping noise. Again as the noise is playing over music I changed the volume for that piece of audio to make it stand out more.

Adding Text By pressing “ctrl T” on the keyboard I was able to get the menu for editing and placing text. I wanted to make the names of my actors appear during the opening scene as often happens in films and TV series. I decided to place the names of the actors at the bottom of the frame. By placing the text over the shot in the editing reel I was able to make the text appear for a certain amount of time before disappearing.

Originally the text appeared and disappeared without any effects and this made the moment it appeared very sudden and clunky. On the effects I was able to change the way that the text appeared over the frame. I changed the opacity at the start to 00 so the text could not be seen. Using Keystone framing I was able to then choose the point at which I wanted the text to appear at full opacity and be fully seen by the audience. I was then able to set another keystone which could tell the text when to disappear again. This created a slow fade in and fade out of the text in the frame.

Because this scene was near enough complete at this point and a rough cut had been made of the scene I decided to add music. I chose a creepy lullaby sounding piece called Slender man which I entranced over the dripping noise in the beginning.

I allowed this piece to play throughout the scene where she walks to the door to help to link to different settings together. I kept the original sound of the video as that the audience can still hear the footsteps creaking on the stairs.

I found other soundtracks that I thought helped to slowly build up tension. I found that by layering the different music pieces on top of one another helped to created a more seamless transition between the different pieces of music and I also thought that still being able to hear the lullaby created a spooky atmosphere.