Editing

We ended up not actually using most of the footage we had recorded at the house except for the exterior shots. In the shot of the outside of the house, with the lamppost, we added a lens flare to make it look as if it was on. When Mike walks past the lamppost we made it so he would block out the light for a split-second. To combine the scenes in the alleyway and the house grounds, we faded to black to emphasise the time gap between the locations.

Throughout the duration of filming, we took lots of long takes and didn't cut a large amount of time off them for a thoughtful and naturistic feel. We used the matched cut to show the different angles of Mike answering his phone. This kind of shot seems natural to the viewer because they understand the action.

Because of the unclear quality of the diagetic sound we decided to remove all the audio and replace it with our own sound effects we had recorded and found on the internet. We found many sound effects on soundsnap.com and we tested four sets of footstep sounds before picking the best one and then cropping it to catch the single footstep. We had much difficulty matching the sound effect to the actual footsteps on-screen but it paid off in the end. We didn't add footsteps where the movements of the feet in the video didn't look as if they could realistically make a sound. Another sound effect we used was the sound of the pebble being kicked under foot. This was quite loud as it was mean to be heard by the main character (Mike).

We went through a lot of soundtracks from many films and TV series to find the most appropriate. We were trying to find a soundtrack that was both orchestral and dramatic but we needed to find something that didn't sound to American. In the end we found one that was most appropriate, "The Seeds of Time" from the "Monster" (the anime) original soundtrack. To make it match the footage we had to make some cuts and fade certain parts of the music into other parts. This matched the most dramatic parts of the soundtrack with the most dramatic parts of the video, and the quiet parts of the soundtrack with the relaxed parts of the film. The cuts in the audio are generally hard to notice, as we used fades and sound effects on top to make them as seamless as possible.

The last thing we added to the audio was the narration, as there was no dialogue in the film. We recorded four narration tracks using a microphone, two by Richard and two by Mike. We were fairly pleased with all four, but tested out Richard's second one with the video and never went back. We had to crop the narration audio into sentences so that we could place them wherever we wanted on the audio track, and set the lines that needed to be in specific places, then placing all the other lines around them. We raised the volume of certain lines to make sure that they werre clearly audible.