Postproduction: Editing

The filming process resulted in almost 50 clips. We recorded the film on Josie's iPhone 11, so she had to upload all of the clips to her laptop for us to edit. Josie used her MacBook for this project, and the iMovie app is what we used to edit the film. Since there were so many clips to choose from Josie and I reviewed all of the footage and made sure that the quality of the shots was there. There were a couple clips that got deleted because of small issues, such as the lighting being off or changes in the background.

Black pants (1st take)

Khaki pants (2nd take)

For example, the differences in the Stalker's costuming from the first time we filmed to the second time made any shots from the first take unusable. Josie and I caught this fairly quickly, and decided that using shots from the waist up of the character from the first take, were not worth the discontinuity. To preserve continuity, Josie edited the clips to flow in a logical order. Here is the shot by shot plan we used to guide the editing process:

Out of our group, Josie is the most tech savvy when it comes to editing. There was not much we had to change about the shots, however there were a handful we deleted from the clip that were in the rough cut. We are currently finding the sounds for our opening, and are testing out these sounds with the clip to see what fits best. The hardest part, ironically, is finding the perfect scream. The scream is an important part of the video, and we wanted to incorporate that classic scream that plays in every horror movie.

Josie and I were using YouTube's audio library to find a mysterious tune that can play in the background of the first couple shots. Our idea was for the noise to start quietly when the Stalker is in the frame, and for the noise to grow louder as Brittany approaches her car. To add some humor Josie came up with the idea of playing "Every Step You Take" by The Police on the car radio, strategically cutting to the lyrics "I'll be watching you" during the mirror shot. Luckily, we were able to capture the quality ambient sound of students chattering in the hallway.