Well, it’s over!
The filming, that is and now to the really hard and finicky bit: the editing!
We have been filming for about a month, we went way over schedule due to a very tricky dance scene, relocation, over zealous students and the general day to day that is school life!
The Editing team consists of 2 foley artists, 2 storyboard consultants and 2 editors. We were not all able to work together at the same time as there would be too much chat and very little work( which is fine by me but Fís do have a deadline!)
The editing group have been meeting every day for the last 2 weeks. I opted for iMovie on the Macbook for many reasons-the main one being that I wanted to use “Apple in Education” and the other reason is that Fis recommend iMovie or Pinnacle. I already had iMovie installed so that sealed the decision!
We started off by watching the tutorials, which I would not recommend if you are easily intimidated by computers! They are beautifully put together and make it all look so easy. The best advice I can give you is Jump On In!
We had hours of footage to sift through but as one of the editors noted, it is always better to have more footage than you need. This really helped us when we were putting together the film as we could easily add fillers (scenes that help gel a story or scene together)
iMovie is a cinch! But, best of all, once we were all comfortable with it, the editing team could be left to work independently. They did a great job and after 1 week, they had a film to show me!
We are very excited but we also know we have a lot to learn and a lot we can bring to filming next year. We learned how to “steal” sound from another clip and add it to a new clip that had no sound or too many children chatting on it! We have realised the importance of lighting, one of our scenes begins in darker interior and suddenly flits to a brighter interior! iMovie can help with this editing, you can add brightness, saturation and contrast but the 2 scenes will never look exactly perfect! but, maybe we are being too critical on ourselves.
We have learned how to crop scenes, where you can take an unattractive item out of a scene.
But, the biggest thing we have learned is your story board ( the visual representation) has to be water tight, the Director has to be assertive on how they want a scene to look. In many occasions, the storyboard was not followed and important filler scenes were left out. In our case, it was too late( and we were too tired!) to re film these scenes so we had to add not-so-perfect scenes to fill. Overall, we think it has worked.
I purchased imovie 10 yesterday as the edition I had, iMovie08 needed a few extra features (speeding up, slowing down, steadying of shaky camera etc.) and we know this will benefit the look of our film.
The rest of the class have been busy designing invites and posters. We are uploading the film to fis next week and then holding our “Wrap Party” and Fis Premiere” on the last week in school.
The Editing team are busy using iMovie to make a “Making of the film” documentary with bloopers and all!
Plenty to keep us busy!
I hope to write one more article on “Fis” before the summer holidays.
Written by Rozz Lewis. Rozz is a Teaching Principal in Athy. She is working with the Class teacher and 5th and 6th Class to produce a film and enter the Fis Film Festival this year. She loves films and thinks everyone should have a “Desert Island Top three”. Hers are ” Silence of the Lambs”, “Sound of Music” and “No Country for Old Men”
Last Update: August 17, 2017