After the long break away from AVID, I felt rather unfamiliar with the software. Surprisingly, as soon as we all got our workspaces and passwords, it all started coming back naturally.
On the very first day, I looked through the 'Meat Bag' footage, sorted it into bins, made a basic rough cut and left it at that. I felt very conflicted about the footage as there were large jumps in the flow of the story and it made me feel anxious when viewing it. I thought, if I have to edit together a film and I'm already feeling stressed just reviewing the rough cut, I won't be able to make it to my usual standard, or enjoy the process.
I left it at that and the following week, after a chat with Kathryn, I decided to import the footage from 'Basement' (which I re-titled Rouge) and start from scratch. Perhaps due to the fact I hadn't seen this footage before, I felt excited and intrigued, and within one day I had made a rough cut, a second rough cut and a diegetic soundtrack.
Following that, I saw that the weather forecast was suggesting there might be snow, so I went decided to spend my free Thursday afternoon editing until the closing time at 8pm. By this time, I had a cut I was pleased with, audio was 90% synced and I was able to do some colour retouching.
As predicted, campus was shut on Friday due to snowfall.
The week after that, I made use of the AVID rooms after 4pm which was when the MAs left.
I added a crop because I felt it gave a more TV-like feeling, and I thought it would be interesting to add sound to the TV. I used that of an old, short trailer and it matched perfectly with the feel I was going for. During the edit, I decided I wanted it to imply that the lives of the characters were also almost TV-like. I also got some ambient and atmospheric soundtracks, to increase the feeling of suspense and oddness, with some strange noises increasing when the Boyfriend enters the basement.
Most of my time was spent keyframing audio and retouching the highlights (as in some shots the settings looked completely different!) so that on its own took about a day and a half. Other than that, I found it very easy to keep everything tidy within each Bin, all the AVID tools felt easy and understandable to use by the end of the editing process, and I handed in my final edit on February 7th.
Here's what that almost Final Cut looked like, with all the keyframes, titles, audio, cuts and the coloured overlay at the end to make it look like a light-leak (although the implied message was it starts again!)
