Audio And Visual Techniques: Video Montage Evaluation

Video editing has never been a strong feature of mine despite my interest in the subject, so the opportunity to work on a project such as this was a welcome thing. The assignment offered a casual look at the video editing software “Final Cut” with a manageable final outcome at the end. Video editing for me previously has been almost entirely orientated around the software “Adobe Premier”. Despite Premier being a very powerful editing kit I found it also to be fairly cumbersome and a hassle to navigate the work space, with things shuffled about from the familiarity of other Adobe products. Final Cut I found just as difficult to navigate at first but learnt where things were much quicker. Once I had my head around the layout of the interface and roughly how things were organized I found it to be a much more convenient and of more intuitive a design than that of Premier.
Moving image since the dawn of television has been a beacon of light shining the way for technology. We ride the achievement of the television over that of the space programme and it has become ever more prevalent in society as time goes on, I see no reason for it to slow. Video editing is a very important part of moving image and something I have never even tried to get any real proficiency at. This project has been an important step into a better understanding of video editing techniques, something I would most definitely like to pursue further with future projects.
I am not often one for working in groups and usually find the notion somewhat daunting, in this case however it was welcome. Up until now I have not been involved in any proper group work (despite this work being more duo than group). I enjoyed working alongside Olly, although our first dive into this project was primarily from separate work with communication of ideas over email.
Our first week or so was spent sending emails to and from; discussing the possibilities of various ideas concerning the different words with which we had to orient our outcome with. Our second week we both drafted ideas of what it was we thought the end piece should look like. We chose the word “routine” from the list and decided on trying to convey the idea of routine through a varying degree of mediums within the video. We chose to portray a narrative of routine centred around the aspects of life, mundane and repetitive, without using footage that directly implied this. The aim was to edit the entire thing in such a way that the utilised footage was to be less relevant than how we edited it together; a message through the timing and organization of the footage rather than the footage itself, so to speak.
In the following week we merged our rough ideas together to form a final piece, working together at college and then finally at Olly's house. However, we did end up using Premier software, after converting all the footage we needed, as we were working from a PC. Collecting our thoughts together from the rough ideas we had initially created was difficult and excruciatingly tedious as, in combining a lot of our work, we hadn't taken into account the many possibilities in the final elements of design. We hit many an unhealthy bump in the road when trying to cut our footage together, for example keeping things fluid and without strange ghosts and artefacts (of which there were many) from other seemingly hidden layers of video.
The end result is pleasing, we have created a rhythmic and vastly hypnotic experience of a life sequence that has stayed pretty much consistent throughout development. I think the way we edited and (in particular) the timing we used to transit between the various footage gives a great impression of repetition and the passing of irrelevant time. I was particularly proud that we didn't get sucked into using any of the horrid but easily appliable 'effects' that offer themselves through Premier. However I would have liked to explore the use of sound further in the production, perhaps touching on creating music with short segments of audio stolen from within the clips. Another one of my concerns is that the video may need a couple of decent viewings before the true message that we were trying to portray can be understood. The video isn't really interesting enough for more than one sitting which makes understanding it a slight problem for those who don't have Olly or myself there to explain it.
As far as the narrative of the video goes we were trying to sequence all our footage to the beat of “travel, work, travel, leisure” and for the best part I think we managed this. The segmented and short flashes of the relevant footage creates a very powerful suggestion of what each part of the video is about. The way we organised and timed the shots however leaves the viewer without fully understanding the message. Cutting it up again with the sharp noise and repeating escalator footage intervals really creates a very strange and unnerving day-dream-like atmosphere to the entire creation. This however is precisely the sort of effect we wanted to demonstrate. A sort of insight into to how we thought life goes on, but of course... the viewer probably can't quite work that out without some help. Maybe a draw back to it's design? I'm not so sure, but this is a direction of conveying ideas that I would like to explore in the future. Slight implication, not blunt and forced opinion.
I think our achievement was in creating an excellent first attempt, but hopefully not last, video production. It is obvious to me what it is I would have to improve on in further video editing projects, and what it is that I have learnt in terms of overall information media design. There were a lot of ideas and concepts that I shall expect to surface again in future projects.