The Project
Cancellation was the fictional short film I worked on for my capstone class Comm 465. I was the editor for this film. The big things I wanted to get out of this project was to be able to get experience editing a short film, gain experience editing a fictional piece, and making something that I could put into my portfolio and show to future employers.
About J
My name is J Clements and I’m a communications major with an emphasis in video production. When I first started on in this major I had no clue what I wanted to do in video, but through my time here I learned that I really love editing. I have had the opportunity to become a certified Avid Media Composer editor amongst other things during my time here. I had an amazing time working on this project.
Pre-production
Now an editors job usually doesn’t start until after pre-production and production, but since we had such a small team and since I was the editor I was assigned with making sure I had a plan for all our VFX shot and how we would accomplish those different shots. This was a big learning process for me because I have never been a VFX supervisor before, and we had a couple of big VFX’s for this project. We had a lot of screen replacement we needed to do, we had a breakaway table we needed, and we also needed to figure out how to send an arrow through an old MacBook.
Our break away table was made out of an old cork board and cane found at Goodwill.
And our MacBook that we destroyed that was graciously donated to us by a friend who had recently upgraded to a new laptop. These two were easy enough to figure out. The breakaway table was a build that I made in about an hour and it worked like a charm. The MacBook was a little harder mainly because we were worried about safety. We had the MacBook set up on a table with a foam stop block behind it, I shot the MacBook in a garage with my own bow and arrow making sure that no one else was nearby.
Production
During day one of our production I was sitting in a separate unused room with a remote DIT set up. This is because I was doing remote viewing and making sure all the props stayed in place between takes and that we didn’t miss any lines.
On the second day of the production I was in the same room but this time my focus was on doing dailies and making sure that we didn’t miss anything from the day before. We only had the space for two days so we had to make sure that we got everything we needed that day before we left.
Post-Production
After we finished filming, we official entered post production. Post production is where I spent a majority of my time, roughly around 50 hours. My role was to obviously edit the film together. I worked closely with the director as we built out every scene until we had a full short film put together. After we had put together a rough cut, we refined it until we were happy with it and we had a picture lock. Once we were in the picture lock stage we worked with our sound designer and collected all the SFX we needed. I then took all those SFX and added them into the timeline where they were required. After that we mastered all the audio and did the color and we got a finished project.
What I learned
Editing I think its a job that a lot of people think is quick and easy but it is far from that. Editing is a meticulous process that can take a lot of effort and time to refine to what you see on the big screen. I loved editing this project and I think it has helped me learn a lot. I think I got a lot better at editing from doing this. One of the biggest things I learned is that doing screen replacements is a lot harder than I thought. I also realized how important it is to make sure you are fully prepared before filming, I think that has helped me a ton in the editing phase of this project. Another big help in this project has been getting a ton of eyes on different parts of the edit so that I can see what is working and what isn’t.