Production Blog: Editing

Hello everyone! Welcome back to the blog! If you read yesterday’s post, you know that my group and I filmed the first few shots for our short film, focusing on drone and pan shots of the boat parade, followed by a car ride sequence. Now that we have the footage, today was all about diving into the editing process and figuring out how to bring our film to life. I first imported all the clips into Premiere Pro and organized them into separate folders—one for the drone shots, one for the car ride, and one for any potential shots that could be useful later. This may seem like a small step, but organization makes everything so much easier when working with multiple clips. After that, I started watching each clip to see what was usable and what needed to be cut. The drone shots were surprisingly smooth, and I was happy with how well they turned out. The only issue was that some of the boats moved slower than expected, making a few shots feel too long. To fix this, I experimented with slightly increasing the speed of some clips while keeping the motion looking natural. I also played with color correction to enhance the deep blues of the water and make the boats pop more. Moving on to the car ride scene, this was where things got a little tricky. As I mentioned in yesterday’s blog, wind resistance made some of the gimbal shots shaky, and I had to find a way to stabilize them. I applied Warp Stabilizer to the worst of the clips, but it didn’t completely fix the problem. In some cases, I had to cut around the shakier moments and blend multiple shorter clips together to maintain continuity. One of my favorite parts of the editing process so far has been experimenting with transitions. I wanted the transition from the boat parade to the car ride to feel seamless, almost like a continuation of movement rather than an abrupt cut. To achieve this, I tried fading from a drone shot that tilts down towards the water into a car shot where the camera tilts up from the road. While there are still a lot of tweaks to be made, I’m excited about the direction everything is heading. Tomorrow’s blog will be a blog speaking on scheduling issues and what we are doing to fix them. I hope to see you tomorrow, and as always, have a great day!