The Breakthrough
- Helen Edgeworth
- May 10, 2020
- 2 min read
So for quite a while I wasn't really getting anywhere with the film, I didn't feel like the clips were mine and that what was being presented in the various drafts I kept producing and I was losing a lot of my motivation for the project.
Matt in our meeting then suggested to me instead of building the timeline, a new tact of evaluating each clip as if it was its own film. I found this process easier than trying to construe a narrative without any context as I had previously done. I then made a separate folder on the shared drive called "edited clips" where I asked my group to review them so we could still collaborate on the film while at a distance.
In one of our weekly discussions, as a group, we came to a new idea about to place the frustrating clips into a narrative structure. By looking back on our original ideas and the edit I made of Casablanca. We decided to start to group the clips together as if they were TV channels and to pace the edit as if someone was constantly clicking back and forth through TV channels. Presenting the audience with a barrage of never-ending stories.
Running with the television idea also opened up for discussion with my group on the visual language the television set produces such as being able to mute the sound of the film and put poor subtitles over or have multiple narrations we are constantly switching between as the channel hops, music can also make the clips appear more cinematic.
I decided to look at examples on Youtube in terms of pacing the edit:
Working from these I decided to use a simple short black transition instead of the glitching effect this was because I felt it was too gimmicky and wasn't something I'd experienced in my lifetime, so would be useless as the aim was to make a film representative of our group's lifetime.
I then decided to create the "rules' for each channel by grouping together certain footage. I created a 'History/Documentary' channel using all the black and white archive footage grouped together and then a 'Murder Channel' using all the home video clips of Lillie. And then cutting all these clips as I had been doing before they all reached a satisfying end.
I then created a separate area on the drive called "sequences". So my group could review my edits and inform me on how to improve them:
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