Editing 'Legal Alien'

The footage you see above you is our first attempt to film; a couple of scenes put together showing the mistakes we made.

Whilst editing our footage we noticed that the scenes did not match eachother, so consequently the audiance who will be watching this film will find it hard to relate which means they will not fully understand the film. So we had a meeting and discussed all the faults in the footage that we recorded and finally came with a disicion to refilm everything. The reason why we decided not to film just a few clips that were missing was because the lighting would be different and also probably the time of day since we did not record at what exact time we filmed this footage. But we took it as an optimistic point of view, because we are refilming everything and we have gone through our first footage several times, we came up with many alternative ideas that could make the footage even more effective and successfull so we changed our story board which hopefully will result to good footage when we film next week.

Treeva Pasha

Today i started editing the Legal Alien footage, however to be honest i had only the skills which i had learnt from our Feed the Fish preliminary task. Therefore i was quite amateur to the whole editing. However as i started editing using the knowledge i had gained before from the feed the fish task, i could get a quick idea of what i had to do. What i found was important when editing was to get the timing and music right. Also finding the shots which are good, doesn't matter if its from the first footage we took like some of the ones put together shown above or from the second.

Because as long as we could put the together, it would create a very good piece of work. Such as the 360 degree tree shot that I gave as an idea when helping and directing Treeva as she filmed, the first shot was not very promising however half to the shot was very stable and clear though the starting half of the other footage was better, so that i put them together and edited it clearly so that it did not jump and so the audience would not notice it and feel disconnected from the film.

Also this applied with another shot which I gave as an idea with the over the shoulder panning shot which goes from the book on the left, nicely to the right of the shot where the laptop is. Treeva did a very good job in filming this, so that it worked. I had seen these nicely connecting panning shots on many movies i watched, which was very influential and representative in my film and directing it with Mariam.  In this shot a key highlight is the subtitles which I talked about in the film commentary that we did together to evaluate our work. We explained by displaying the film on the projector and directing it. That is done in many movie extra options if you look on DVDs. I used the contrast between black and white to show bad and evil, also using white font seemed to work relatively well in the film. During the film you see a lot of quick black screen shots, which lead to a longer shot with white font saying 'I found it' that exposes the tension I built up. Also the meaning of this part was to show that the evil is slowly taking over him but then at the end of the opening sequence he is taken over.

So that as long the footage was edited properly, the footage itself didn't have to be perfect.

Another key point i would like to mention is the main title of the film when it is presented.
Through the questionnaires, i found out that the colour blue had a lot of meaning in sci fi and trying it out with a blurred screen gave a very nice emphasis on the title and allowed the audience to focus on the title after the tension built up from the running sequence we start off with on the opening sequence. Making the size of the font small also added to this nice effect, showing not always big fonts get the attention of the audience. Also mentioning the use of contrast in our film alot, making the size of the title 'Legal Alien' font small it allowed the audience to compare the size of the title against the tall tree in the blurred blackground.

To make sure that we had a range of good shots though, it was important for us to film many shots from different angles, which Treeva did. Whilst adding good sound after i edited the right shots was important so that it created the correct atmosphere and emotion that we wanted the audience to feel, which Mariam did. This shows that working as a team was very important to get a successful outcome with different ideas to make our work unique and outstanding.

When i was editing using the new version of I Movie 09 because the file of our footage was AVCHD which was different to the other groups, because we used different camera; the Lumix Parasonic FZ38. However it allowed us to get a high definition video. By using the new imovie 09 I found that it was easier to use than i thought and that it had some good effects that enhanced our outcome, that you wouldn't be able to do with the old imovie. For example the main effect we used alot to show the genre of our movie was the 'SCI- FI' effect that gave a green tint effect, which was unavailable in the old imovie.

The problems i found using the Imovie 09 when editing was that it crashed every now and then without allowing me to save the work, so i would have to re-do the work again. Though we could fix this major problem by using a different computer fortunately. Otherwise there weren't really any problems with editing on the new Imovie 09. I quite enjoyed editing the footage actually. Especially adding the different effects to make our work look much better.

Myung Kwon