Exhale, My Love: Editing (Using Avid Media Composer)

As a part of our Professional Toolkit unit, we learnt how to use Avid Media Composer. Which coming from using Premier Pro was a little bit challenging and complicated.

From the 5 tutorial sessions we had with Victoria Storey, I learnt quite a bit about the software. Though having similar components to Premier Pro, I found it to be more difficult because it has many little elements that I'm not sure Premier has.

With Exhale, My Love; the vision I had whilst editing was I wanted it to be more of a silent film since the brief only gave us 5 words to play with. Our writer chose to include the words "I'm so proud of you" which I wanted to include subtitles for.

Assembling the Clips
Whilst assembling the clips, I wanted to introduce the characters to the audience first, then give a little foreshadowing of what was to come. So I gathered some significant clips from different scenes and put them at the beginning of my sequence. The next step was to go watch all the rushes and choose which ones I was going to use. I watched them scene by scene so that I could select my in and out points for the shots that I liked and roughly put them onto the sequence. I did this from scenes 1 through to 7 which gave me an overall feel of the length and the story. I then went back into the sequence and made the necessary cuts&clippings and transitions.

Sound
With sound, we had sound files from the TASCAM and also some folio sound files to input into our editing. Since my film was "silent", I didn't want to include too much sound into it, so I mainly used sound from the TASCAM and matched it up to my clips, I then used the folio sounds to fill in any gaps where I couldn't hear the sound of whatever was happening. I was more focused on the overall background sound/song, and I ended up going with a simple background instrumental that won't distract from the message of the film.

Colour Correction
My vision for this film was bright and light at the beginning and darker and moodier after the characters found out about Elliot's terminal illness. So using the knowledge I gained from Victoria during her tutorials, I colour corrected the scenes to look exactly want I wanted using curves mainly. I went in clip by clip and made sure the match it to the previous clips in the same scene so that there would be no continuity errors.

Titles and Credits
Using the title tool, I wanted a simple title, over my actors at the beginning to match with the simplicity of the film's genre. For the credits, I followed the basic film rolling credits template and used the same instrumental song for the credits. I made this decision because when I included a different song for the credits it didn't flow as well as with the background instrumental for the film.

Overall
I found editing in Avid very challenging, but I take on any challenge that comes my way and try my best. I feel like I learnt a lot more through trial and error when editing the film and I found the more time I spent trying and re-doing the more comfortable I felt with using Avid. I really enjoyed the Avid workshops and definitely would like to gain more experience using it.