Editing

I enjoyed editing our film opening a lot because I’ve been doing editing for my own TikTok videos. Therefore, I’m quite familiar with the process. This makes it not that difficult to me since it’s not a new skill that I gained. The program that I’m using is Jian Ying, a Chinese editing app created by ByteDance. The tools are very clear and complete, I could finish the whole editing process without using other apps. Something that I found a bit challenging but very interesting was creating the phone call voice. First I recorded my voice to the right length, then I had to use the “microphone”sound effect. The voice sounds like it’s from a device now but it’s way to quiet and does not fit the original bar setting we had for her. So I scrolled through the sound library for background noisy noise. I searched up keywords like “noisy sound”, “street sound”, “disco sound”, “environmental sound”, etc., but nothing was what I was looking for. Finally, I found a sound in“party sound” that fits what I was hoping to have. A head aching thing that we encountered was that there were no music in the music library that fits our expectations as the background musics throughout the film. So later on we decided to record music from NetEase and then upload it into the app to do editing. I scrolled through more than 30 playlists and listened to more than 100 horror musics to pick out the ones we used. What research have I done to develop my skills? I’ve been doing some research on LittleRedBook(a sharing, posting app) and DouYin(TikTok Chinese version) on the tools that I’ve not used before in the app. For example, which filters create what effect, what music to use, where we should add dynamic effects, how to change the voice recorded, etc. Also, I learned from one of my friend on how to add the music into Jian Ying. Here are some links👇

28 林子暮发布了一篇小红书笔记，快来看吧！ 😆 GWtzVi8mYLxbNkK 😆 http://xhslink.com/w1v6Nh，复制本条信息，打开【小红书】App查看精彩内容！

12 剪辑白衬衫发布了一篇小红书笔记，快来看吧！ 😆 FVcwQScsN8Aduzb 😆 http://xhslink.com/0nLgPh，复制本条信息，打开【小红书】App查看精彩内容！

https://www.xiaohongshu.com/user/profile/5ef243d30000000001004fd7?xhsshare=CopyLink&appuid=5ef5ad460000000001001036&apptime=1655512465 3.33 lPk:/ 不要再问我为什么我的画质这么清晰了，3秒教会你一个万能高清调色方法 %剪映 %手机摄影 %教程 @剪映研究所 https://v.douyin.com/YA9SyQa/ 复制此链接，打开Dou音搜索，直接观看视频！ 4.12 Xmq:/ 为什么你的视频没别人的清晰？视频试试这样调，座机秒变显微镜！%剪映 %手机摄影 %剪辑 https://v.douyin.com/YA9MTj1/ 复制此链接，打开Dou音搜索，直接观看视频！ Does the editing follow storyboard? The main structure follows the storyboard because the storyboard is edited to suit the setting. For example, where the curtains and tables will be at, how the character is going to move, etc. But there are places where we chose to change. This is because the point of view from our storyboard is mainly third person. In our opening, we had to add in more first person point of view shots to give the footage affection. The major difference from our storyboard is we did not make the character Tiffany die in the end because we wanted that suspense on the audience. Special Effects used: Sound effects we used include volume change and voice-change. For volume change, we need to set up the amount of time we want it to fade in and fade out. For voice-change, I used a loud-speaker effect which makes the voice sound like it’s not from the same space as the actress. It was exaggerated a bit from what we would normally hear from an electronic device because we want to make sure the audience could differentiate the sounds.

Loundspeaker

Recording added in when editing

Party sound effect + Volume diminishing

Recording of our needed soundtracks

These are playlists and songs I’ve listened to in NetEase…long list ot go through…..

Footage effects we used include “instant fuzz”, “heartbeat”, and “glitch”. The instant fuzz is applied at the beginning sequence to make the footage glitch as if the audience’s screen was broken. This can engage the audience more with the film. The heartbeat was applied at the very start of the footage, right after the studio logo to start the film. The glitch is used at the point where “Blackswan” was playing on the television. The amount of time for this footage is very long because Shirley needs time to change so we sped it up and added glitch and filters to make it look less boring and slow-paced.

special effect: glitch

special effect: instant fuzz

special effect: heartbeat

Text effects we used was “malfunction”. It matched very well with the “instant fuzz” footage effect which create a 1+1>2 effect. The font was futuristic and has a neon glow. It makes it stand out from the dark background. Did we need to color grade the opening? YES. We needed to color grade our footage because it was very warm-toned. Warm toned makes the footage look more warm and sweet, especially in a “home” setting. So what we did is added two layers of filter to make it more cold toned and low-saturated, lowered the brightness, increased the contrast, and altered a few other parameters of the footage. Another color grading was the Television part. We turned the footage black and white to make it more creepy.

I also color graded my studio logo because I wanted it to have the color of heart and veins(blue and red) to fit the thriller genre. It was originally yellow and blue which is too “sunny”.

Later on, after our footages from August, we re-edited the whole thing again. But luckily, we only need to insert the new footages into where they need to be, we could keep our previous footages.

Why is our editing style appropriate for our genre & audience? Before we edited, we went to see loads of movies and teleplay in the thriller genre. We found out the common things they had and added them to our opening. For example: -The color for thriller films are all quite low-saturated and they usually have a blue color tone. To follow this, we changed the parameters of every single footage separately to make them in the same tone and color. To increase the thriller atmosphere, the footage should be quite dark. This makes objects less clear in dark areas where no light shines which creates suspense. The audience will wonder if something will come out from the dark. Due to this, the focus of the audience will automatically turn to places where there’s light and more visible. -Thriller audience like is a special opening. The opening of a film should not be going on like a normal footage, it will make the narrative more interesting. This is why we choose to put the text between footages as the title sequence. -In thriller films, there are often slow downs and fasten ups. This makes the film go in different paces. Different paces makes the audience engage more because scientifically, people will not focus on things for a long time. If we had footage all in the same length and speed, it would bore the audience. -Cut on action editing is something that we used throughout the whole play to keep it coherent. The footage would link together better which is more likely to make the sink into the narrative. -The soundtrack we used are consisted by very contrasting forte(loud) and piano(quiet) noises. It also has gaps where between clips sometimes to give the audience a break. The music we chose all create suspense because they are all very repetitive and has a long lag. This make the music echo and brainwashing. -Studio logo is right at the beginning of the film. Color grading the studio logo takes the audience into the film as soon as they see the logo. Or else, it is likely to have the audience hoping for some other product instead of a thriller. Overall: Is the editing success? We feel that the editing is quite successful. We both liked it a lot because we feel that what we’ve created is something that fits very well in the thriller genre. The movie outcome is very different to what we’ve started with. The footage and soundtrack was totally put together by us and the whole thing did not have major mistakes. We also did not encounter any big difficulties because since it’s something digital, we could search up everything we don’t know, or is struggling on. A challenge we had was that we couldn’t edit together because editing could only go on in one device. So we had to make sure our version has no mistakes or missing footage to be able to pass on to the other person.