Editing session №1

 Today we had our first editing session, which in my opinion went quite smoothly. Before we opened Adobe I was scared we would have too much footage and would take too long sorting it out. However as soon as we started going over what we shot, it started making more sense.

On the shoot we didn't do everything in chronological order: we started from the middle of the sequence, then collected footage of its beginning and then moved on to the end. This is why our media in Adobe was not organised. As a team we were ready to spend time sorting it out, naming important files and creating separate folders, but we were suggested not to, because we are limited in terms of the time for our editing. 

The first thing we did was finding the very first blur mid shot of Juls waking up. Zoe was the first one to have a go at editing, which is why she started stitching shots together while discussing it with us. As we collected quite a few mid, wide and close-up shots of the same scenes, we were just putting them together in different order to see which go together the best. We also decided to do music and titles later: our priority for now is to stitch the clips together into one sequence. Even though, the skills we gained during our editing workshops helped us a lot in terms of operating in Adobe, it was tricky and challenging to make the action continuous, when stitching shots together. We were trying to be very precise at this point by moving the playback head slowly through the stitched clips and seeing whether the movement looks continuous or whether it is abrupt. About 20 minutes in the lesson, I switched with Zoe in order to try editing myself as well. I was again trying to make different combinations of shots in order to see which ones look better together (e.g. "mid shot+wide shot+ mid shot" or "mid shot+close up+wide shot"). When I finished the "waking up part of the sequence and we started moving on to the bathroom scene, Isi had a go at editing as well. 

This is where we faced one issue we are planning to sort out during the next editing session. We have a wide shot in the mirror's reflection of Juls entering the bathroom and looking at herself in the mirror. As she is wearing glasses, she is supposed to take them off before starting to wash her face. The problem is that we don't have one continuous shot of her entering the room+taking her glasses off, which means that we have to stitch the "entrance" shot with another mirror reflection shot of her taking the glasses off. If we put them one by one, it will not look good, because the frames and her position are a tiny bit different. We thought "okay, we can have a close up of her putting the glasses on the windowsill between those to shots", but the issue is that it turns out we don't have such a close-up. For now, our idea is to have a close-up on the tab between those two shots so that it does look continuous and the action makes sense. We didn't have enough time to completely figure it out yet, but this is our main task for the next editing session.