Production Pursuits - Initial Edits & Prop Sourcing

Hey folks! Over this past week I have made a few advancements in my final task journey so let’s recap! 

• Tuesday - Filmed some b-roll inside a governmental building and driving shots 

• Wednesday - Reached out for permission to use copyrighted songs 

Now from Thursday to today (Sunday) I have made even more progress. I started editing! Since I have little footage it wasn’t anything major this time around but I wanted to keep the clips I did have nicely sorted. I decided to import all my videos, including the interview portion from last week, onto my editing software which is CapCut. I have used CapCut in all of my previous media-related expeditions so it makes sense to go ahead and use it once again. At this point, I have become friendly with the features I need to use which makes my life a lot easier. It also allows me to speed up my editing process slightly more. As many of you know by now, editing is tedious. And though it can be methodological and thrilling it is still laborious. Therefore, my inexpert but polymath abilities regarding CapCut can accelerate the operation. 

Back to the actual editing, I focused on cutting down the total length of clips. This all started by watching every clip. As I have said before, I took a lot of takes of the same shot which meant I had to decide which clip best fulfilled the role of the idealistic shot compositionally. Due to the influx of clips, the total time was at 10:18 which is more than 5 times the maximum length of the opening sequence. This meant I got the task of shortening these clips. My process included using the “Delete”, and “Split”, and tugging on the white sidebars inwards to condense the media. 

After a while, I managed to get the total time of the clips to be 4:16 minutes. Now, this is double the maximum time but it is okay for now since I was just doing a holistic cutdown for the initial edits. Later when I have cultivated more clips I’ll have to go back and cut down or even speed up even more shots. I also wanted to keep extra clips so I have some fall-back b-roll as a backup plan. 

The file I ended up buying

As for other ventures, I got some of the props sorted out. I bought the “murder mystery files'' from Amazon. Amazon has a vast majority of cases to choose from but I wanted it to align as close as possible to the plot I have. The key feature is that one of the suspects is a woman and the weapon used is a knife or it is not explicitly said what weapon was used. Surprisingly this proved to be much harder than anticipated. Out of all the concocted cases, there was none with a woman as a suspect. There was one in which the murdered individual was a woman. So, I decided to go with this one since it at least had a character I could use. And, since it is not explicitly said what the weapon is, only that there was trauma to the head, the murder weapon of a knife could be used. Therefore this case file marked my criteria. I went ahead and bought this case file which was a total of $26.97. Now, this is my most expensive item thus far which made a real dent in my production budget. As I’ve reiterated, this is a low-budget production and I would like to keep the price below $50. The case file is half of my budget so I might have to compromise with other things yet to be bought. Otherwise speaking, the case file should be shipped in within the next couple of days. 

All in all this week was focused on getting the smaller but essential tasks done. Hopefully next week I can make more progress on filming so I can keep up with my pre-planned schedule. Stay tuned!