Editing

The editing process was quite complex, and sometimes complicated and tedious, but in the end I think I did a pretty good job.

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Colours

The first step in achieving the contrast between the two timelines, the flashforward and the present time, was editing the colours, lighting, and saturation. The cemetery scene needed to feel and look bright, hopeful, warm and alive, so I slightly increased the saturation and highlights.

For the other scenes, I basically did the complete opposite. They were supposed to feel cold, and a bit sad, as well as hopeless, and overall just less alive. So I gave the shots a tiny bit of a blueish tint, increased the shadows drastically, to give them a darker look, and also decreased the highlights for the same purpose.

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Cuts

The next thing was the cuts between the shots, and the cuts between the scenes. For the cemetery scene, most of the shots have a fade cut in between them, to give it a softer and slower feel.

In between the scenes, I just put a black screen, to give a clear impression that the scene changes. As for the cuts, all the other scenes besides the cemetery one have normal cuts in between the shots, to give them a more rushed and harsh atmosphere.

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Sound

For the diegetic sounds like footsteps, engine noises, birds, and rustling leaves, I used royalty free sound effects from this website, because none of these sounds were really audible in the videos I filmed. I did my best to sync all these sound effects to what was visually happening on screen, which was quite the tedious process, but I think it turned out pretty good in the end. In the screenshot below you can see the audio track for the ambiental sounds like the chirping of birds, and a separate audio track of many short clips constituting the footsteps. I actually tried recording the footsteps separately, but my microphone wasn't picking them up.

Next I recorded the voiceover, which I had already scripted out. I did a few takes and experimented with different levels of emotion in my voice, and in the end chose a pretty monotonous sounding take because I felt like it fit the story the best. I recorded it in multiple shorter bits, so that it would be easier to move them around and fit them to the video when editing. I also tried out a few placements of the voiceover, and eventually settled on a placement that fit the best with what was happening on screen.

Lastly, I added the music. I placed an instrumental bit between two pieces of voiceover, and I think it creates quite the impactful emotional effect. There's a piece of the song at the end too, where you can just hear a bit of lyrics before the opening ends. There's also a bit of instrumental from the song in the background of one piece of voiceover, because I felt like the music quieted down too suddenly to make room for the voiceover.

I added in the appropriate fades to make the music smoothly fit into the overall audio of the video, and also balanced out the different audio tracks to make sure everything was equally audible and that nothing was unusually loud or quiet.

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Credits

The last step of the editing process was to add the onscreen credits. The title was quite straightforward to get right, as it just needed to appear for a few seconds and then fade.

The rest of the credits were a bit trickier to edit, because they needed to appear over some pretty dynamic shots, so I couldn't really leave the text just statically on screen. So I figured out a way to edit it so that it appears on screen and sort of moves along with the camera, in and out of the frame.

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And with that, the editing process was over, and the semifinal cut of the film opening was done. This has been a very rewarding experience, and honestly it's been amazing seeing this project come together. And while there are certainly some imperfections and some things that could have been done better, I'm still really proud of how it turned out.