Brief 2 - Rock Climbing Documentary

Me and Fraser decided it would be best to start from scratch with the rock climbing documentary edit. We felt it allowed us more freedom to implement our own ideas into the project.

After naming all the subclips and putting them into separate folders, Fraser did the task of assembling a rough cut. We went with the idea of starting off with the bedroom scene (location 1), then moving onto the bouldering location (2), and finally the climbing with ropes location (3)... after I looked at the edit, and fine-cut it, we still had to fill another 40 seconds or so. Because of this, I decided to show more bouldering footage up until the end, however I now realise that it seems as if we have two endings, which you should never have for a short film (if any)!

For this scene, I used the jump-cutting technique for when he is climbing the wall, I feel it worked well with the soundtrack and offered a different take on the standard 'one-shot' clip.

Throughout the edit I implemented jump-cuts and synced it with the music; for our first edit it worked brilliantly, however later on we found out we couldn't use the music... so in the end we had two edits, and of course went with the second one. Being brutally honest, I prefer the original    edit a whole lot more than the second one, probably due to the soundtrack and the way in which it worked so well. But on the other hand, sifting through for a fitting soundtrack for the main edit proved a challenge, but one in which we had a strong and positive outcome.

For the opening (LEFT), we went with the panning shot (on a crane) that reveals the climber achieving his goal to the top of a huge rock. We felt it was a fitting opening, a striking and memorable shot to open on that will grab the audience's attention.

Throughout the piece we aimed to give the audience breathing space, as to almost 'let them be at one' with the scenery, the location and the concept of climbing. To do this, we continuously faded in narration in small to medium bursts, never too much to lose the audience's attention with a wall of narration.

The titles also swept in from the right, not too big and over-whelming to take away the intensity on the opening shot.

We added fade-ins, fade-outs and adjusted the sound levels when the narration was played. We would lower the volume of the soundtrack when the narration was played, and rose the levels back up again subtly when it had finished.

We decided to get rid of the basement footage entirely as it was all poor quality.