Collateral Remake: Editing Process

Pre- Production

During the pre production side of creating the remake to the "Collateral" we were given a task during our media session with Dan (our media teacher), to draw each shot we saw from the clip, while doing this Kiah, wrote down what type of camera angles where portrayed, whilst me and Vanessa started creating the shots we saw on "YouTube" on the storyboard. During this phase, we learnt what shots we had to create, and the intensity of the characters.



Production

Location of our remake...

Soon after, the class were given a practical lesson, in which we had to do a remake to the Collateral, using our storyboard to guide us through the process. Our group chose to film in a empty park, located in front of the college, the positive outcome about filming in the park was that it was close to the college giving us more time to set up and film. However, our group found that our remake was lacking the same busyness and activity it did in the actual clip, as there where no background people. We where ultimately given an hour and a half to film our remake, which I found was enough time but because it was our groups first practical together, it took longer than it did; having problems with the camcorder stating "no memory card has been inserted" , when it was clearly put in. Due to the amount of light coming into the camcorder, I decided to switch on the "ND filter" which responded by reducing the amount of light taken in by the camcorder. Furthermore, our roles during the production task were Kiah and Vanessa who where acting as the two men from Collateral, and me filming the shots that took place. On occasion if one person had to act, the the other individual would take a turn recording a shot as well, in which Kiah had filmed the ending shots. 

Post- Production

Fading of the music

The next phase of our remake, was the editing process. Before we began editing Mary (our media teacher) took the class through a step by step on how to use the "Video Drive". Every group in the class was issued with their own video drive in which you save all your work to. The video drive supplies each group with their saved work, allowing them to finish anything off. After this event, we took our memory cards out of the camcorder and used a piece of hardware which downloaded everything off the camcorder onto the Apple Mac computers. Soon after, each shot we recorded was placed in the "Final Cut Pro" software, which would enable us to edit our clips in terms of sound, transitions and cutting etc. Firstly we began to cut our shots to where we needed and renamed them all so that it would be easier for us to identify, in doing so we then placed our edited clips on the sequence board, so that it would all flow together. After, our group began focusing on the music, in which we blocked out all the sound from the shots only using some police sirens which we found suited well with our clip, we then went on "You Tube" and listened to a series of music which we would find appropriate, we finally narrowed it down to "Mind Heist" a piece of music taken from the "Inception" soundtrack.  The screenshot above, highlights how the music was edited in terms of fading it. The two circles indicate where the music was faded, we faded the music out because if we didn't it would have ended abruptly, thus the reason why we used this technique. If you watch the clip you will notice how the music, matches the the movement of the clip in which the bag drops on the floor, making the music build the tension to it.

Where to find the transitions

Moreover, once the editing of the music was finished we then moved on to adding transitions. Me and Vanessa began experimenting with different transitions looking how well they suited our clip, many of them didn't look good with our clip, so we settled with "dissolve". What I preferably like about the dissolve was how it made the clip flow, and changed from one shot to the next. We used the same transition throughout the clip, as if we used more then it would look like we added too many edits, making it look very busy taking away the suspense of the entire clip.  

Transition in the works

The example on the left  identifies the transition in use,  you can vaguely see Vanessa in the background holding her bag, and you can clearly see Kiah becoming more visible to the camera. This here is an illustration of one scene moving into the next and then fading out.  The transitions were the last of the many edits we did, moving on to saving our finished product onto the video drive.

Errors/ Mistakes

After watching our finished product and the original Collateral sequence, we established how different our remake was. Despite using the same plot, our clip didn't use the same busy atmosphere and identical shots. We also learnt, that because we weren't using auto mode our camcorder wasn't focused much in the beginning, making our opening look blurry not being able to see Vanessa clearly. We also didn't use a variety of different shots, where we would occasionally keep using wide shots instead of close ups. Also, our group recently found out that we had to take pictures of our group filming while on set, because we never knew about this task we were unable to perform it.