Editing The Little Things

For our Production Module we had to get into teams and film from a script called The Little Things. The idea of this production was to take on board lighting and shot framing.

Link to the film:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pykuso-kkyw&feature=youtu.be

Whilst editing this project, we found that many shots simply lasted too long and the cuts were not fast enough.

One cut that is very noticeable is we cut to shots of the characters hands very often. We felt that this shot was suitable and matched the theme of the film because the character is meant to be in a nervous position.

The issue we had with cutting to this shot is that eventually it became repetitive, but our shots with the character talking became too long and it was boring to watch, so it didn't help the pacing of the film. So by cutting to shots of the hands this helped the pace of the film to become faster.

Another issue was that overall the video was too long, our limit was a 3 minute video and it was originally 5 minutes. We had cut out some scenes to make it short enough,  choosing what to cut out was quite difficult because we had already cut down the original script by a lot.

There was one scene where the woman talking describes killing her brother because she is annoyed by the humming he makes whilst she is reading, when we were editing this sequence we were unsure whether to put both shots of him being strangled together or if we should cut to the woman talking in between. In the end we decided to cut to the woman talking in between shots because it made more sense from a narrative point of view, as she is in a doctors office explaining her fantasies of murder. Below is a shot by shot list of what I just described (The shots follow from right to left)

We thought that visually the present day scenes of the film should be in black and white, so we applied the effect but it wasn't quite dark enough so we had to use levels to add more darkness to the shot. Overall, the effect was quite good and I think it suited the theme of the film. During the scenes in colour our original colour grading looked to harsh so we decided to remove it, the shots appeared to be very yellow and orange and it was uncomfortable for the viewer and took the visual element away from the finished film.