After the tutorial I spent the next few days editing until evening as I seem to be able to concentrate better the later it is. I found with the editing that you've got to think outside the box a bit and I've learnt from other projects that sometimes the footage that you capture before or after a take, accidentally or what you don't think can be used can come in handy if you just think of other things you can do with it. The problem I had with some of the footage was there were things in the background I didn't like or the shot just wasn't interesting enough but I managed to find ways around it. One particular shot was the girl walking to the bathroom opening the door and then letting it close behind her, there was a fire door sign in the background so firstly I cropped that out (I had to zoom in quite a bit to make sure it wasn't in shot but because we wanted grain the fact the picture quality was reduced luckily wasn't a problem). To try and make it more interesting I played around with the speed of the door closing, making it fast then slowing it right down just as you thought it was meant to slam; I then repeated this shot many times but rotated the door so it was in a different position everytime, it was a bit weird but I liked it as the rest of the film also included shots where the angle and position of images had been changed so it didn't look out of place and I felt was inline with it being 'experimental'. There were also shots of Sophie (who acted in it) laughing which were just bits inbetween takes but I decided I really liked these as they were good for showing this 'dark' side and helped in making her look a bit mad and out of control, at one point using the opacity I layered this image with that of her drinking and just repeated it which made her look a bit crazy and uncontrollable and most of all it made it seem more dream like so it looked like this girl was seeing this image in her head and not like it was actually happening.
From start to finish I tried to keep in my mind that this was meant to build up so I tried to keep the shots of her in bed at the beginning juxtaposed with images of the dark side and then gradually as it went on I introduced shots of her getting out of bed then walking to the bathroom and while doing this I kept introducing more and more different shots and cutting them together quicker so that as time went on the madness and thoughts in her head grew and got worse, I also cut these with images of traffic moving faster and going backwards etc to also help symbolise and reinforce the madness. At the end we decided to bring it back down again so I used an image of her 'good' self looking in the mirror and then her 'bad' self doing the same (at that point also cutting any music off so it was silent) I wanted this to try and represent her analysing herself and maybe coming to a realisation that she knew her identity and excepted that. To show this I used 2 shots of her rubbing out the word identity from herself and her ripping up the word identity and reversed them so it looked like she was putting the word back together. In regards to the use of black & white and colour we decided to keep most of it in black and white apart from the shots of the traffic outside (to show this is something happening outside her room) and some of the shots that were juxtaposed together looked good with the contrast of B&W and colour because we thought it showed the conflict between the good and the bad and added to the confusion of it all.
Overall I am happy with it because I have put so much time and effort into it, there are definitely things that I am not too sure about, like if I have managed to make it tell some sort of story or if people are just going to be too confused (some confusion is good as that's what the film aims to create - an audience that can feel what the girl is going through) but I want them to understand the point of the confusion at the same time. There are also some shots which I wonder do they fit in enough, while still having an element of randomness like the handprints and some other shots which I can't think of at the minute. As long as people find it interesting and understand the basic story I think I'll be happy.
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