Editing, Take I

We learnt quite a lot from our first editing session:

• Don't edit on a computer in edit suite 1. You'll end up interrupting lectures, not being able to access your footage because someone's using your computer, and find it hard to concentrate because the guy opposite you keeps talking about his gory sexual escapades.
• Hunt down an IT bloke and get him to sort out your logon ID so you can use more than two computers in the entire building.
• Learn to use Final Cut properly before trying to edit things. A rather late but very helpful editing workshop cleverly solved this problem for us.
• Prepare your shot lists and storyboards before you shoot to avoid staring at a blank timeline on your computer screen for several hours.

We also discovered we hated our footage. What we thought would be brilliant handheld footage turned out to be shaky and dizziness-inducing once on a screen bigger than two inches. On top of this, our narrative made very little sense (and Grace hated the ending). We weren't a happy bunch, to say the least.

Once we had our tutorial with Dom, though, we had a better idea of a direction to go in; use short takes, quick cuts, and give it a more experimental feel.