Out of Date - Assembly

After being given the brief for Out of Date, I instantly started to transfer and import the files onto my hard drive and Media Composer so I could begin editing them as soon as possible.

Importing Footage.

Before I did this I looked through the different scenes from the rushes to decide which I would prefer to do and after looking through them all, I chose the second scene where Alf and Tony go to Alf's sisters house and discover her online dating website business. I chose this scene because it contained the least amount of continuity errors and was both well lit and well shot, with a range of takes and camera angles on all the characters.
After I imported all the footage from this scene, I started to label it all and separate it into the different shot styles so I could easily find the shot I wanted when progressing through the narrative.

Fully labelled scene.

Now unfortunately due to technical issues with my harddrive which I will talk about in a later post, I don't have any other screen grabs of the assembly process so I will just be describing what I did that I can remember and discussing any issues I had.
I started out be watching through the wide shot of the whole scene so I could get an understanding of the script as well as where the different punchlines came in and the characters reactions to one another. After making mental notes of this I put the whole take of the wide shot into the sequence, and started to put in close ups or mid shots of the characters when I thought it was necessary. As this was only an assembly, I wasn't worried about the sound overlapping or dialogue being out of sync as I was just testing out where reactions should go and when close ups should be used to create empathy with Alf and to show the relationships between the characters. I also wanted to keep in mind the importance of the dialogues pacing and how key this is especially in comedies to get the comedic timing just right.
When I got to the end of the scene applying these techniques I went back and watched through it again and began to remove the overlapping audio and almost all of the wide shots as I felt they made it harder to engage with the characters and made the scene less immersive and personal. The whole sequence is still very rough and needs a lot of touching up in terms of pacing and sound consistency, but overall I was happy with what I had done so far and was ready to start moving it to a rough cut as soon as possible.