Claire Alexander- Editor

In my role as editor i tried to assemble our footage into a more narrative order as well as creating effects to make the section of film more aesthetically pleasing. Many problems were also encountered along the way,mainly to do with the fact that I am somewhat incapable of using Macs.
For our section of film i tried to give the same look as that of Pleasantville and Sin City,by selecting one colour and desaturating the rest of the footage. This image shows the effect from Pleasantville in 1998,seven years before it became wideley known as the "sin city effect". To do this i used Final Cut Express to create two layers,one with reduced saturation and the other by selecting the colour of the dress using the chroma keyer tool and then inverting the selection. This was a lot more difficult that using the select colour in Adobe After Effects,however this refused to work (for which I'm blaming the Mac) and we therefore had resort to other methods with more than a little help from a YouTube tutorial (shown here). This method took a little longer and yet created the same effect. In order to reflect the film noir/neo noir movement,we also used influences from classics such as Murder,My Sweet and Double Indemnity,particularly the black and white,pre-1970's colouring and the dusky,dark atmosphere. This use of desaturated footage can be seen in modern films such as Ed Wood and has the effect of making the film look older. As the footage was filmed in colour the clips were simply desaturated using final cut express and gave the intended impression of a vintage,classy and typical film noir.
In cutting the piece together we had further difficulties regarding the formatting of the video but as soon as all our footage was uploaded it was easy to divide it into clips. As all the filming had been done in chronological order it was easy enough to arrange the clips into their order as they had appeared in the original script and therefore it was a matter of removing unnecessary sections such as the multiple takes we had acquired particularly when it came to lighting the cigarette as well as the last few seconds of the kiss. By looking at the multiple shots i selected the ones most suited due to lighting,amount of blur and whether or not the appropriate character was visible in the shot. For example,the opening scene where Max walks towards the camera was selected from two versions,i chose this shot as the second was a lot more blurry and it was a little difficult to see Max due to the darkness at the time. The picture on the right shows a still from the clip i decided to use.
Also,for the opening shot i had originally intended to use a similar effect as used in Ichi the Killer (in the opening credits) and in Lesbian Vampire Killers where shot speed is increased selectively to give a stylised,cartoon like impression. Focusing on a likeness to Sin City,this effect would have added to the comic-book,neo noir aspect of our film,however,in the end this just overcomplicated the whole process so this idea was subsequently neglected.
In order to further reduce complication a few shots have been disincluded due to the fact that they would need to have been converted to a more usable form and were,regardless of file extension,not accepted by Final Cut Express. For example,an establishing shot where the camera pans across the cityscape as Amber walks to centre screen was not included.
On the other hand,some shots were extended or included in order to create substance as well as allowing more time for the voice over,as well as to establish the characters. There were very few close-ups of Amber's face filmed so in order to establish her as a significant character i selected an unused shot from later in the footage and added it in between shots. This image shows a still of the shot i added.Initially it was not even part of our final footage and features Thea talking to Amber and Max about the upcoming scene. This,on reflection was not as neatly assembled as it could have been,however was successful in revealing a character in more detail.
In order to improve the overall editing of our film project i feel i could have made the effects more stylised,for example,by reducing the colour count and giving certain sections a more comic book feel similar to that of the animated scene in Kill Bill,as well as this i would like to have changed the vibrancy of the selected colour to a brighter green making it stand out more and contrast the colourless surroundings,however,due to a shortage of time this may have overcomplicated the entire process leading to unnecessary problems and is too ambitious with a limited knowledge of editing software.
Overall however i am thoroughly pleased with the finished piece and feel that the editing adds to the film noir style of the piece in that it uses typical visual aspects of the movement such as monochrome colouring as well as a limited number of extensive shots as well as revealing shots and close ups. However,given more time i feel i could have added to the neo noir stylisation of the piece by using more modern influences as shown in our mood board. On the whole i feel the entire project was successful and worked well in keeping with it's intended style and atmosphere.