Now that filming has finished, of course editing began. I thought that if I edited at home, it would be easier as I could work in the times that I wanted to, and be away from any distractions. Turns out that was a big mistake. The only software I had available at home was "Windows Live Move Maker". As all sentences are just the same 26 characters in a different order, you could have infinite monkeys writing on infinite typewriters, and still a way of accurately phrasing the levels of contempt I hold for this software would not exist. Open importing all my unedited clips, the first thing I noticed is that there isn't a timeline to work on, something I thought was mandatory for editing software. Instead, the clips just lied at the side (where the "shelf" is on the below picture). I was expecting something more like this:
No timeline meant no quick way of adjusting sound levels, so going through each individual clip and editing that way was a real chore. I also didn't appreciate the way it decided to to corrupt files seemingly at random. This meant I had to close and re-open several times, often having to re-edit bits if I didn't save my progress every two minutes. One positive of this though could be that by re-editing, my editing hopefully would have improved. Here is a screenshot of my film mid edit.
Another of my problems with this wretched thing is the sorry excuse for a titling feature it has. Firstly, the text preview was never the same as what it actually came out as. I eventually achieved the final placement by a lot of trial and error. When it came to my title screen i came across the problem that whatever font / effect combination I tried, it looked far too amateur. There was nothing remotely horror-y I could work with unfortunately. So that is why the titles looks as out of place as they do.
When it came to looking for music, I wanted something to fit the film, but that was also copyright free. I stumbled across this website; http://incompetech.com/m/c/royalty-free/.
It was loaded with music licensed under Creative Commons (meaning I was allowed to use it my own work)
I spent a good amount of time listening to a lot of tracks until one struck me as one that could work. This happened with the piece entitled "Bump in the Night" which can be found here; http://incompetech.com/m/c/royalty-free/index.html?keywords=bump+in+the+night&Search=Search.
This piece was suitably eerie, and was exactly the dark soundscape I was looking for. From my research I learnt that a good score is key to maintaining a spooky atmosphere, and hopefully I achieved this with the help of this track.
