I finished editing! 😁

In case you didn't read the title, I finally finished editing my film opening!

First, let's talk about how the last bit of my editing process went. After a small bump in the road where I forgot how to use the text tool, it was smooth sailing. The only thing I had left to do was add all the credits that appeared at the beginning. I pretty much knew exactly how to do this already because of the trial and error I went through on my first day of editing with making the title of my movie appear onscreen.

I decided to basically do the exact same thing, with a little fade in, hold, and fade out. I chose to have each text box appear for 3 seconds, which I decided was enough time for people to be able to read it and then ignore it. I made the fade-in and fade-out effect by messing with the opacity and voila, that was it. Of course, I had to do that for every single text box so that was tedious and monotonous, to say the least, but didn't take up too much of my time or anything.

Now, I had previously mentioned the idea of adding little animations to the film as another method of visual storytelling but I've decided against it because I feel like the story I had in mind has a darker tone that some of my inspiration that included animations, it would be a bit too dramatic of a switch to have cute little animations and then go on to the rest of the movie where the tone is much more serious and somber. So overall, I just moved away from the idea.

Finally, I wanted to talk about what the editing process has taught me. Basically what I learned is that I have to have a better plan when filming because I've discovered that there's only so much you can do in editing when you don't have every shot you wanted or need. I think for most of the opening it was fine and I was just putting the puzzle pieces together but at other times it felt like I was creating puzzle pieces from scratch, trying to use what I had to make the story work. I realized when I started editing that there were a few shots that I hadn't gotten that were more integral to the vision I had of the opening than I had previously thought, and I had to work around that, ultimately changing parts of the opening from what I had had in mind and had put on my storyboard. I don't think this made the opening worse or compromised the quality of the work I created, however, and I didn't do too bad a job at filming because editing truly was not that difficult once I figured out exactly what I wanted to do with what I had given myself.

I think that the next time I have a project to film or just a large undertaking ahead of me, I will take even more care to plan ahead of time and ensure that I have a clear image of what I want so I'm not stuck scrambling at the last second to make up for my shortcomings.