Organising the Footage

Jamie, the director of the film, is the one who had to collect all the footage and transport it via hard drive from Bournemouth down here to Eastbourne so that we could edit. Luckily he a really skilled editor and spends a lot of his time in uni editing his own and other people's projects. 

He was able to organise the footage already for me which was an absolute lifesaver. There was over 300GB's of footage all in all and that was just in one format. He organised everything into the days that they were shot in. That meant that going through the script to find each scene we could quickly go to the day that that scene was shot in and find all the relevant files. This massively sped up the editing process. All the files were kept on a hard drive because my Mac doesn't have the space to store that many files and so the hard drive was the only sensible option.

Also on there was all the sound files captured on set for dialogue. This was also organised by day and so we could quickly find the correct sound file to pair with each shot as they were obviously shot on the same day.

In order to speed up the process even more when in Premiere Pro we made a bin for each scene in the film and then dragged each shot for each scene into the relevant bin. This again made it so we wouldn't have to trawl through the different days to find each scene. We could just work chronologically through each bin one by one. This was a life saver for me.

I wasn't actually on set for the filming which is quite common in the world of editing. Usually you are a cog in the machine that is utilised after production has finished. This is quite confusing and something I'm not used to. I am used to filming with really small crews of but a few people. I have done all the editing for our projects but I have also been on set helping direct and working with the camera. Whilst I am on set I am constantly thinking about the edit and thinking what will fit where and what shots and elements might be missing. This makes it so that when it comes time to sit down to edit I already have the complete edit playing out in my head as I was there for the entire filming process.

This made this a new experience for me. I hadn't seen any of the footage before I sat down to edit. I had the script and so I knew the rough order of events but I didn't know what was shot when or which angles were captured for each scene.

This made the presence of Jamie along with the organisation of all the footage absolutely integral to the speed and success of the edit. Being able to quickly organise everything and have the director there to guide my path sped up the process immeasurably.