Week One - Introduction to the Module (31/01/13)

During today's session, we were introduced to the post-production strand of the production skills module. We talked through what work needed to be included on our blogs. The three main elements that we need to include are:

• Annotated Screens Grabs
• Reviews
• Theory

We also looked through some books that we could use to help us with the theory part of the blog. Some of the books that were recommended to us were:

• Broadcast Engineering
• Screencraft - Editing & Post-Production
• In The Blink Of An Eye
• 100 Ideas That Changed Film
• Making Movies by Sidney Lumet
• When The Shooting Stops 

We were given our first brief, which is to created a 04:30 - 05:00 film with the title Night Journey, using the rushes that we have been given. The final piece must be non-sync sound. We were put into our pairs for the piece and I was paired up with Lewis Hague.

After that, we refreshed our memory on how to setup a Final Cut Pro project correctly. First, I started by making the timecode start at 10:00:00:00 rather than 01:00:00:00. Then I changed the autosave feature to make it save my project very 5 minutes rather than the default of every 30 minutes.

Then I saved the project as Night Journey, which is the title of the film we will be editing for the first brief. After I had saved the project, I imported the footage that we will be using for the brief and then we were given the task to finish for next week, which was to look through all of the footage, make sub-clips of each clip and label is all up correctly.

We also talked through the difference between interlaced footage and progressive footage. I learnt that interlaced footage uses many horizontal lines to make up the image and that there are 50 fields per second (50i) when there are 25 frames per second. Progressive footage is footage that has been recorded on film and is run through a projector at 25 frames per second (25p).

Finally, we watched the opening sequence of the film, Election, and spoke about the editing techniques used in the sequence.