Five Tips for Editing Scenes

Editing! The vast world of editing is fun to explore! However, when you have no experience, it’s tough. That’s why I’m here to tell all my Romeo and Juliet editors out there 10 tips for editing an effective and flowing scene.

Camera Angles

While camera angles aren’t done while editing in post, they’re the most important thing to editing. If your shots aren’t intriguing or creative, you will lose your viewers’ attention immediately. If you have a small frame with five people jammed into it, your audience doesn’t know where to look. For shots with a lot of people, you need to get either a wide shot or put your shot at a large angle. For shots where you want to focus on one person, to POV shots of another person in the scene. If your scenes are boring or average, you lose eyes.

Music

MUSIC MUSIC MUSIC! Music is the core element to drawing attention from the audience. When was the last time you watched a movie that didn’t use music to draw you in? Guardians of the Galaxy, Deadpool, The Lobster, and so many more movies use different types of music to intrigue audiences. It also does not have to be a score by any means. You can use rock music from the 70s like Guardians of the Galaxy did and pull it off amazingly. In fact, I’d suggest using well known or at least pre existing music for a lot of the movie. It’s more fun to watch when you know the songs and scores tend to sound cliche when found on the internet. But be sure not to overuse this concept (COUGH COUGH SUICIDE SQUAD COUGH COUGH)!

Overlap Audio

Audio is not going to sound good if you cut to a new scene halfway through a line and use the dialogue from the scene you’re cutting to, it will sound AWFUL! My advice is to continue the dialogue from the previous scene into the scene you’re cutting to. It doesn’t sound abrupt, and it makes it sound realistic. If you change angles but keep the audio file it makes it sound as though the scene is actually taking place. This is essential to having a flowing scene.

Whitewalls and Depth

Whitewalls are SO ANNOYING! Whitewalls are basically when your characters are in front of  a wall or building that is simply blank and boring. Please don’t shoot in front of these! Even though you want attention to be focused on the main characters, you also want an exciting setting for your characters to be so that it makes the setting of your movie appear more interesting and fun. Throw up some posters or something to make your scene less bland.

Color Grade

Color Grading is essentially just using color to make an image more interesting. You can add tints, midtones, and highlights. You can play with saturation, gamma, brightness, pivot, and contrast. Lighting and Color make all the difference. Filmmakers use color in film to set a tone. Maybe putting yellow highlights in cna make things seem dry and stale, maybe putting light blue midtones in makes it look creepy and eerie. Color can perfect a movie’s tone and look extremely well.

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