OUAN501 - Practical, Sequencing / Editing

This task took up the main bulk of the practical process and was the stage where all of the elements I'd worked on; sourcing footage, script writing, narration editing techniques and thoughts regarding music would come together and I'd see how everything worked as a piece on its own rather than seperate parts. It took a lot of hours to take the footage and isolate certain sections, ready for sequencing. It was during this stage that some improvisational occurs and decisions are made as to what sections of footage work best. At the beginning, 4 minutes sounded like a long time to me, but during the sequencing stage I soon realised how quickly it was and couldn't use as much of the footage as I initially thought.

What helped when I was editing everything together was the notes I had made on the script so that I knew what I had in mind when I wrote the original narration. This meant that I had the majority of the clips I needed essentially ready to place together. There were times however when I thought a particular video or news report would compliment what the narration was saying at the time quite well, so I went and gathered a few more video clips because of this. I enjoyed this process quite a lot because it felt like the closing stages of the project and all of the 'hard work' and planning was complete. I tried to add some humour and variety into the sequence, opening with a clip of a news reporter stating that he could tell Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook perpatrator was a video game addict just by looking at him before cutting to the start of the main talking points. I tried to experiment a little with transitions and the spacing of video. I was conscious, however, that I would be overusing certain transitions and so used them sparingley where I thought they worked best for no more than five or six times throughout the entire documentary. Sometimes a simple cut works a lot better than a fade, and by doing this it means that the footage is on screen for a fraction longer without it fading to black. Aside from attempting to utilise a variety of different transition effects I wanted to make sure the spacing of video and the narration itself contained calculated pauses, so as to allow the audience to absorb the information. I figured that if it was a continuous three minutes of talking it would be harder for the audience to keep up with both the visuals and the narration. To make this easier and stagger different sections I made sure to incorporate scenes of interviews where I could to back up what I was saying and allow the audience to see other people talking first hand, this meant mine isn't the only voice that's heard for the full duration and breaks the audio up quite nicely. When it came to the volume of footage in comparison to the volume of my voice it was much louder. This was a simple fix and by increasing the volume of my voice clips by around 10, they were the same volume and there wasn't a discrepancy in volume between scenes. The timing of transitions was somewhat worked around the narration so that no visual was onscreen for too long. A tool that was invaluable during the process was the 'trimming' tool. This is one of the fastest ways to precisely cut up different sections of video footage and meant that I could hone in closely on even just a few sections of footage that needed to be isolated form a longer clip. Finally, I tried to experiment with timings. A couple of times in the piece the screen goes black for a short time after something is revealed. These types of timings I believe allow the audience to consider what they've learnt and adds to the effect of what is being communicated, for example if it was a dramatic piece of information, this helps to emphasise it.

I learnt a lot during this section of the process. I think this is the most thought I've put into the editing of a paricular piece, purely because success of it as a whole was so heavily reliant on it. I realised the importance of moderation with effects and transitions and I think the project has benefitted from this approach. The most difficult part was selecting footage that worked together, and also condensing so many hours of video into just a few minutes of short clips made the process quite complicated. In my opinion the documentary and narration was successful at communicated in a short time frame relevant information regarding perceptions and research on video games. I'm happy that I was able to incorporate the positives of video games, highlighting their artistic value and I think it was a good piece to compliment the work I did on my essay.