Editing Blog: Piecing scenes together

 As I was the head of editing, I had the primary OpenShot project on my computer after the files were sent to me. There were 10 videos to start, ranging from 5 seconds to the 22 second walking scene from two different angles (one angle was a slow-mo that I didn't end up using). It was my job to order these scenes into a cohesive story and make sure all the parts added up to exactly 1 minute and fit them together with the limited footage I had. I started with adding the music to solely provide the audio, an mp3 of Boulevard of Broken Dreams. The original mp3 I was using appeared to be the reason that OpenShot would crash upon startup whenever I tried to do anything, so I ended up converting the music video to an mp3 instead. 

There were some key spots that I knew would be filled, like the beginning scene would be my partner walking out the front door with his dog, and the climax where the dog is stolen being played on the drop. I started out by placing all of the clips in order, leaving out any variations of scenes. It was still a jumbled mess, and I needed to line up the climax. This would come more into effect later, but I also wanted the scenes to have good pacing, since some were about as long as one of the verses in the latter half of the song. I began to just work with the uncut walking scene, and lined it up correctly with the music. I added a desaturation effect at that climax point to reinforce the sad tone of the scene, and I also planned to use this for the "flashback" scenes to indicate they are in the past. 

What I had put together after that were the beginning scenes (walking out the door, pan to the road, looking up at the sky) and one long middle scene leading to five second clips of flashbacks until the end. I continued to add scenes until they roughly lined up with parts of the song, and it lasted 60 seconds. For the final shot I used the pan from the sky to the road in reverse (tilt from the road to the sky, fading out). Not only because I didn't have enough scenes to fill space but also because it seemed fitting to end up in the sky where the first tilt came from. I thought the scene of the main character looking up to the sky felt more fitting for the second half of the video, but the timing worked well to have it in the first half. I made a cut in the long walking scene, but only to apply the desaturation effect to the second part of the cut. For some of the shots I added quick fades out to make the transitions less jarring. Some of them didn't need it, like the two separate scenes of my partner yelling "no". There was still more points that I could change and make improvements on, but the video was starting to look well put together. It felt like I was done piecing scenes together.