Continuity Piece: 1st Edit

We conducted the first edit of our continuity piece using Serif Movie Plus. This is Microsoft software that is available on our school network. 

After our first edit, we sat down and discussed what we thought the strengths and weaknesses of our continuity piece were. Our teacher also gave us some feedback. These were our thoughts:

Strengths:

• We successfully kept continuity throughout the piece

• We included a variety of shots and camera angles which made our piece interesting

• Our teacher told us that she liked the high angle shot through the window as it was totally different to any of the other shots we used and it focused on outside, rather than inside

• The first few shots need to be cut shorter, as they are a little too long. Focusing on one thing for too long will bore the audience. Cutting the shots will make no difference to the continuity or sequence of the piece:

Weaknesses:

- To improve the continuity of the conversation towards the end of the piece, the shot of Josh saying “Thank you, I need to finish my homework” needs to be cut shorter. This means that Caitlin’s reply will be straight away, and will seem like the conversation flows.

- The shot of Josh opening the door needs to be cut and sped up. The shot is slightly too long, and as Josh must have opened the door more slowly towards the end of the clip, it almost appears that it is being opened in slow motion. As we need it to look a normal speed, we will have to increase the speed.

When will we make these changes?

We will make the changes to the edit when we go and visit the collage to use their media facilities. In the collage, they have a type of editing software called Premiere Pro, which we have never used before as our school do not have it. As we have never used it before, we have arranged to be given a tutorial on how to do the basics, to give us a basic understanding of the software before we experiment using it for ourselves. I am looking forward to learning how to use Premiere Pro as I have never used it before, and I think it will be interesting to compare it to other editing software I have used such as Serif Movie Plus, and iMovie. 

Were there any issues with Serif Movie Plus?

I thought the software was quite easy to use, and it was simple to navigate. However, we found that when we saved the piece as a Serif Movie Plus file, that it was bad quality and the footage was freezing and jumping. Therefore, we went back and saved it as an MP4 file and we found that this solved all of our issues.