WIDESCREEN & CROPPING

To make our film Home Away From Here more cinematic, I put the widescreen effect over every shot. To do this I did the following-

I then selected - Filters - Widescreen - Type - 2.35:1

The widescreen effect didn't work on the shots that had been  rotated, as the widescreen effect applied itself to the raw shot rather than the FCP7 window. This is displayed below-

The shot displayed above was rotated because of the 'Dutch' angle it was filmed at. The director decided he wanted this climactic shot to be levelled as to not distract the audience from the experience. The shot itself is the key point in the film in which Jack takes his own life by slitting his throat.

To combat the issue and create a working widescreen effect, I created two rectangle shapes and positioned them perfectly in-line with the rest of the 2.35:1 bars. I used the left and right arrows to switch between shots to ensure the bars were of the same size. They appeared like this in the timeline-

Other certain shots required cropping because a member of crew was in the shot. The show

Unfortunately the level of gain appeared to increase as I cropped the image. The more you crop in on an image, the quality of the shot reduces. This shot was paramount for continuity purposes and the second take was just as bad. The widescreen bars also helped cut out the sound designer from the shot.

This part of the scene was difficult to cut due to the extremely poor levels of acting.

2:50 - 3:00 minutes in our film (displayed below) Jack rushes to the door to stop the woman from locking him in. In the original RAW footage (also shown below), Jack makes almost no attempt in grabbing the door before she closes it, resulting in a comical, pathetic attempt at saving himself. I therefore decided to incorporate a series of jump-cuts in the sequence- by quick-cutting shots of Jack banging on the door in despair, I attempted to create a sense of urgency and tension.



Home Away From Here - RAW Bad Take from Lewis Hague on Vimeo.

NOTE - The RAW footage (above) features sound issues, however it is for visual purposes only.

Home Away From Here from SHU Film & Media Production on Vimeo.


The process of editing this film has indeed been difficult, but I feel confident that I have discovered ways in which to get around/over certain issues such as the ones discussed above. If an editor is faced with an issue, one must think of an inventive way to get over the issue.