Editing of Flashbacks

The first thing that I needed to do with the good flashback footage was to put all of it into the timeline on Final Cut Pro. This included the clips that didn't go out of focus or have camera shake. This is represented in the screen grab below:

I then cut the footage on the timeline so that there wasn't any sections where the focus did go out for a second, or if they were a bit long. This reduced the time from the original 1 minuet 4 seconds to 49 seconds- of which I wanted to reduce down to around 30 seconds- so that it fits with the plan that we have for our timings for the film opening footage.

All of the clips that were of a singular view, and didn't have any action in them, I cut down, and slowed down so that the clip was almost a single image played for a space of time- reducing inconsistencies such as the stomach going up and down from breathing , unwanted movement of the camera or the footage going out of focus. By slowing it down and cutting it, this breathing motion was not noticeable, and the camera appeared more steady in the footage being edited in the screen grab below, for example:

Regarding the footage that had action within it- for example when the killers hands are digging into the victims stomach- I cut the clips up into smaller ones, reducing the length of the clip, and also scattering the split footage in between other shots, allowing the building of tension through the flash backs, starting off with a simple clip of the victims face, and having really gory quick flash backs throughout, adding to the tension and build up in the scene.

When placing the split "gory" clips, I made sure that there was one every other clip, until the last section where a small group of them were placed- in the attempt to reach the climax of the building of tension from the gore and blood.

Once all the clips were put in order and cut down, I made them all to be the length of just over a second, so that they wouldn't be too long. This I applied to all of clips except for one.

The last piece of footage that I needed to look at was the piece where the killer closes the eyes of the victim, showing the same angle as the first piece flashback that I had edited- as if the flash backs start and end with the same shot. With this clip, I cut off the initial bit- reducing the unnecessary length of the clip- and then let it play for a bit longer than the rest, representing its importance over the rest of the flash backs.

The order of the clips is supposed to build the tension off the scene, the gore and "slasher" genre being represented in the film opening through these clips. I am happy with the footage, and the edits so far, the links between each clip making them really seems like flashbacks, memories, of the murder the killer has just committed. The next step in the editing process of these flash-backs is adding effects- of which Raman is to do.

The video below shows what the flashbacks looked like after Raman had edited this same footage, adding the effects that we wanted. We haven't added sound at this point, sound being the final step in editing.