Editing - Charlotte Coyle

Once filming had finished we were more than ready to start editing. We had around 40 minutes worth of filming to cut down to two minutes. We started by choosing what scenes we didn’t think were necessary to our production. Once we had got rid of these, we had to reduce the time of the scenes we needed. Our main problem was when Emma, Charley and Riley were walking into the grave yard. We had too much footage of this and felt it was hard to reduce it; however as a group we made difficult decisions of what parts to delete. Another problem we hit was what parts of the dialogue to use. At times we all disagreed on what worked well within our thriller, however instead of having a big argument over nothing, we decided to work together as a group and put all of our ideas together. By doing this our dialogue works perfectly for our thriller.

When we had cut our footage down to the correct length we began to edit the sound part of our thriller. We first of all had to decide which scenes to mute, as the day we filmed was fairly windy so obviously the camera picked this up. The sound of the wind affected the atmosphere our thriller created, so muting certain scenes was our only choice. The scenes we muted we added sound to. We decided to use Ship Ambience, the same sound throughout the thriller, so there won’t be any confusion. We used it, as it had a deep and eerie feel to it which is part of a thriller convention. In our thriller we have shots of a notice board with things about our child actress on; they appear once every so often. When they appeared we wanted it to have a dramatic feel. While looking through sounds we came across a ship horn. We tried it with the scene and it went flawlessly, although on one of the longer shots of the notice board the sound had to repeat itself, this did not work as it was clear it was a ship horn and made our thriller more into a comedy. As we had our hearts set on using that sound, we simply decided to cut the scene of the notice board down so the ship horn only had to play once. When Charley is taken, we used a piercing sound, so that the viewer can feel distressed like the child is. As a group we decided to use a hockey shot sound when Emma realises her daughter has gone. This is a peculiar sound to put in, but nevertheless it works well. The last part of the sound editing, was adding sound effects. To make the scenes look natural we added a seagull sounds into the background of certain scenes we felt didn’t have enough going on in them. Another sound effect we used is when Emma’s phone rings; we chose to put in a ringing tone as we felt hers wasn’t in keeping with the tone of the thriller, as it was an upbeat tune. The last sound effect we used was the dog bark, as our dog ‘actor’ was unable to bark on cue; however we were able to solve this problem with the sound effect. All sounds we used are non diegetic apart from the characters dialogue which is all diegetic.

As a group we added our credits to our thriller. We chose to use a black back ground for the credits as it would keep within the thriller conventions. We used white coloured font to stand out from the black background. On the credits we used the actors name and the film name at the begining of our thriller. At the end of our production we added a fact, this is to make our viewers to feel more involved with the film and make them more aware that it was a kidnap that had just happened.

If we had had more time we would have adjusted the colour, so that the viewer would feel more disoriented which would help them relate to the characters, as they would feel disoriented too. Another advantage of adjusting the colour of the film would make it more adjacent to the thriller convention of being dark and confusing.

All together I felt the editing went well, even though we had a few disagreements, we were able to resolve them by putting all our ideas together to get, what we feel, is a brilliant thriller production. One of the main problems we had was by using the new Apple Mac's, as we had never used this version of iMovie. We spent around two lessons to become familiar with the program. The time we spent learning how to use the program was worth while as we were able to excel on it later on in the production.