Action Plan
Having set out my challenge in the previous section, I took part in a short film entitled Wraith, which I edited with the joint purpose of being my AS Film Studies coursework contribution and the chance to fulfill my Arts Award goal. The film was shot in December of 2013, but all of the editing was done in the space of a little over a week due to a delay in getting hold of the footage. As a result of this delay I had only a short amount of time to edit before the coursework deadline, and the restrictions put on the coursework submissions meant the story had to be cut to less than two and a half minutes. With these restrictions in mind, I had to keep the film succinct, whilst sustaining the narrative flow.
Evidence
The film was uploaded to YouTube, and is embedded below as evidence:
When I began the edit, I wanted to be sure that the pace of the narrative was maintained consistently throughout. In order to do this, I began with a rough cut unconstrained by the time limit, in order to see exactly how much I needed to trim down. This rough cut clocked in at three minutes and forty-one seconds, so I knew I had to cut out seventy-one seconds.
Following the traditions of Classic Hollywood continuity editing, I opened the film with an establishing shot of the initial location, which gave me time to include the film's title. From there I cut to a master shot of the interior. Were I responsible for every step of the film from pre-production to post-production, I would have included a lengthy section of exposition at this stage, but as I hadn't been the director of photography, I didn't have the option. This helped me focus on getting to the important aspects of the film.
To make it clear that the character from the first scene (played by myself) is the film's protagonist, and to slowly enhance the intimacy of the audience's relationship with said character, I began the scene with three cuts (at 00:07, at 00:10 and finally at 00:16) which get progressively closer in, slowly making the character more prominent in the scene.
At 00:24 I cut away from the master shot to a closer angle, at a point where there are no characters. This was to convey the idea that, at this point, the door in the background - and what might be at the door - are the main focus, rather than the character. Once the character turns away from the door, I entered a sequence where the lights flicker repeatedly. In addition to the actual action shots, there was a lengthy shot focusing on a light, which I cut into individual flickers. These I inserted into the cut as cutaways, to provide light flickers which were faster than physically possible for us to do in production and make everything more intense, as well as detaching the audience from a solid grounding point - the light is at the wrong angle to be in camera at any other point in the sequence - to enhance the effect of the villain.
Once the flicker sequence came to an end I returned to the character on his phone. This time I chose to use a close-up of the phone which I hadn't shown earlier, as this made the character seem on edge, and keeping close to the things he knows. When the flickers resume again, I intersperse the shots with single-beat extracts from another shot, of the titular Wraith knocking on the door. As the sequence progressed I made the cuts steadily closer, to indicate a rising intensity, which culminated in the front door of the house opening as the scene changed.
At 01:15, the Wraith appears in the background as the protagonist runs past the camera. None of the takes captured this effect perfectly, so I replicated it by encoding the best take again as an image sequence. This done, I isolated an image where the relevant part of the background was blank, then erased the parts of the Wraith which had appeared too soon frame-by-frame using a separate image editing software. Although this was time-consuming, I felt the fact that it hadn't been done physically added to the inhumanity of the Wraith, which made the scary aspects of the character even scarier.
At 01:23, just before the protagonist enters a narrow alleyway, he encounters the Wraith again. To enhance the effect of the increasing terror I used a cut-point at this instant where only the hedge in the background is visible as the boundary between two different types of grade. Before this point, I'd done a stylised, brighter, colour-intense grade, but after this point, with hope being lost in the character, the grade made the image darker and more desaturated, with the shadows enhanced a little more. To maintain this theme, I made sure that these elements of the grade were played up incrementally more each time the Wraith appeared subsequently.
At 01:48, and again at 01:50, I used whip-pans to get around the fact that, due to the inability of people to be in two places at once, the Wraith couldn't be everywhere. I feel the cuts worked effectively because I personally find it difficult to determine at what point the shot changes, and this only serves to make the Wraith more alien and more terrifying.
Starting at 02:00, the film's culmination sequence is divided into five beats, each quicker than the last, as the Wraith teleports steadily closer to the protagonist in three stages. These I broke up further with reflection shots of the Wraith in the eye of the protagonist - an effect I achieved by manipulating the footage frame-by-frame in the edit. This adds, in my opinion, an element of hopelessness to the protagonist's situation - the Wraith is at this point permanently embedded in his sight.
To avoid having a clear-cut ending, I decided to finish the film with an abrupt cut to black as the Wraith covers the camera with his hand. I tilted the credits to a slight angle to make them seem uneven, adding to the uneasiness in the mind of the viewer, before bringing everything to a close with a thematic link to the earlier flicker sequences, as a light flickers once more, peaking to white, before providing a natural fade to black.
Overall, I think I achieved everything I set out to achieve in the earlier goal. This has been reinforced by positive feedback I had when the film was shown to other members of the Rural Media Company's BFI Academy. However, if I were to do it again, I would probably enhance the Wraith's abilities further still by using some clean-plate shots of the door where the Wraith used to be in lieu of some of the shots of the Wraith knocking on the door.
Peer Feedback
Joe Hoyle, from the same production team as myself, has said that he enjoyed the film and felt it was smoothly edited.
When I began the edit, I wanted to be sure that the pace of the narrative was maintained consistently throughout. In order to do this, I began with a rough cut unconstrained by the time limit, in order to see exactly how much I needed to trim down. This rough cut clocked in at three minutes and forty-one seconds, so I knew I had to cut out seventy-one seconds.
Following the traditions of Classic Hollywood continuity editing, I opened the film with an establishing shot of the initial location, which gave me time to include the film's title. From there I cut to a master shot of the interior. Were I responsible for every step of the film from pre-production to post-production, I would have included a lengthy section of exposition at this stage, but as I hadn't been the director of photography, I didn't have the option. This helped me focus on getting to the important aspects of the film.
To make it clear that the character from the first scene (played by myself) is the film's protagonist, and to slowly enhance the intimacy of the audience's relationship with said character, I began the scene with three cuts (at 00:07, at 00:10 and finally at 00:16) which get progressively closer in, slowly making the character more prominent in the scene.
At 00:24 I cut away from the master shot to a closer angle, at a point where there are no characters. This was to convey the idea that, at this point, the door in the background - and what might be at the door - are the main focus, rather than the character. Once the character turns away from the door, I entered a sequence where the lights flicker repeatedly. In addition to the actual action shots, there was a lengthy shot focusing on a light, which I cut into individual flickers. These I inserted into the cut as cutaways, to provide light flickers which were faster than physically possible for us to do in production and make everything more intense, as well as detaching the audience from a solid grounding point - the light is at the wrong angle to be in camera at any other point in the sequence - to enhance the effect of the villain.
Once the flicker sequence came to an end I returned to the character on his phone. This time I chose to use a close-up of the phone which I hadn't shown earlier, as this made the character seem on edge, and keeping close to the things he knows. When the flickers resume again, I intersperse the shots with single-beat extracts from another shot, of the titular Wraith knocking on the door. As the sequence progressed I made the cuts steadily closer, to indicate a rising intensity, which culminated in the front door of the house opening as the scene changed.
At 01:15, the Wraith appears in the background as the protagonist runs past the camera. None of the takes captured this effect perfectly, so I replicated it by encoding the best take again as an image sequence. This done, I isolated an image where the relevant part of the background was blank, then erased the parts of the Wraith which had appeared too soon frame-by-frame using a separate image editing software. Although this was time-consuming, I felt the fact that it hadn't been done physically added to the inhumanity of the Wraith, which made the scary aspects of the character even scarier.
At 01:23, just before the protagonist enters a narrow alleyway, he encounters the Wraith again. To enhance the effect of the increasing terror I used a cut-point at this instant where only the hedge in the background is visible as the boundary between two different types of grade. Before this point, I'd done a stylised, brighter, colour-intense grade, but after this point, with hope being lost in the character, the grade made the image darker and more desaturated, with the shadows enhanced a little more. To maintain this theme, I made sure that these elements of the grade were played up incrementally more each time the Wraith appeared subsequently.
At 01:48, and again at 01:50, I used whip-pans to get around the fact that, due to the inability of people to be in two places at once, the Wraith couldn't be everywhere. I feel the cuts worked effectively because I personally find it difficult to determine at what point the shot changes, and this only serves to make the Wraith more alien and more terrifying.
Starting at 02:00, the film's culmination sequence is divided into five beats, each quicker than the last, as the Wraith teleports steadily closer to the protagonist in three stages. These I broke up further with reflection shots of the Wraith in the eye of the protagonist - an effect I achieved by manipulating the footage frame-by-frame in the edit. This adds, in my opinion, an element of hopelessness to the protagonist's situation - the Wraith is at this point permanently embedded in his sight.
To avoid having a clear-cut ending, I decided to finish the film with an abrupt cut to black as the Wraith covers the camera with his hand. I tilted the credits to a slight angle to make them seem uneven, adding to the uneasiness in the mind of the viewer, before bringing everything to a close with a thematic link to the earlier flicker sequences, as a light flickers once more, peaking to white, before providing a natural fade to black.
Overall, I think I achieved everything I set out to achieve in the earlier goal. This has been reinforced by positive feedback I had when the film was shown to other members of the Rural Media Company's BFI Academy. However, if I were to do it again, I would probably enhance the Wraith's abilities further still by using some clean-plate shots of the door where the Wraith used to be in lieu of some of the shots of the Wraith knocking on the door.
Peer Feedback
Joe Hoyle, from the same production team as myself, has said that he enjoyed the film and felt it was smoothly edited.
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