During this production, I have fulfilled all the roles of a director, cinematographer, and editor. Here, I am focusing specifically on my experience of being an editor during this film's post production.
Before going through the editing process, I wanted to fully understand the responsibilities and skills necessary to an editor. For this purpose, I have researched the functions of the role.
Simply put, "the film editor's job is to join together the various shots into scenes, and the scenes into a finished movie" (Reichsman).
A film editor usually works closely with the director to realize his or her artistic vision for the film. Being the director of film, I was fully aware of my own artistic visions while editing. I was intended to create a film that utilized the stylistic elements of German expressionism. Inspired by other German expressionist films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, and Suspiria, I envisioned the film's psychological horror to be expressed through the psychedelic lighting, use of primary hues (as seen from Suspiria and Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarves' splash of technicolor), and the subjective camerawork that is a characteristic of a horror film. A detailed explanation of my artistic visions in cinematography is shown in process journal 4, where I also explain my role as the cinematographer.
Before the film shootings, I made a basic plan for the editing so I could learn the software techniques beforehand. For this process, I decided to work on an editing software called Final Cut Pro X. Having experience of using this before, I was more fond of this software than iMovie because if offered a wider range of color tools, which is essential to my film.
Editing techniques from the software
1. Setting the Screen Ratio
One thing I have realized from my previous films and other student films was that none of them actually followed the cinematic screen ratio of 21:9. I was inspired to do so as I saw Dongjae's German Expressionist film, Umbekkant.
2. Noise Reduction
3. Color Correction
Kuleshov Effect
Previous to the shooting, I had planned to include the shadow figure and the female protagonist at the same shot. However, as I began to shoot I realized that it was impossible to do so due to the small space. I couldn't create enough distance to produce a woman's shadow. So I improvised by replacing the shadow of a woman with a shadow of a hand, and decided to use the Kuleshov effect in my post-editing. The Kuleshov effect, pioneered by Lev Kuleshov in the 1910's, is an editing technique that cuts back and forth between two subjects, where one is usually human. This creates an illusion that the subject in the next shot is what the person in the shot is seeing; thus, it can manipulate the audience's emotion.