Editing

So, a week and two days after we started the edit, the "Portrait of Place" project is almost complete. Initially, I didn't feel particularly confident about editing the project - I didn't feel that the footage we had was as good as it could be, and my (limited) experience with editing film wasn't exactly filled with positive memories of everything running smoothly. However, aside from a few issues when we started (neither of us really had experience with Final Cut Pro, and we made the mistake of saving the project to the Mac's hard disk rather than a portable drive, meaning we can only edit on the same computer and account), the process has been much more productive than I expected.
The mistake I've made in the past with editing is that I assumed that an edit only 'flows' when the pacing is solid, whereas, with this edit, I've learned that it 'flows' well when movement flows between shots - it might seem obvious, but I used to overlook the importance of keeping movement consistent, and now I've come to think of it, I don't know why or how I overlooked that.
The only real issue we've had since we put together a rough cut has been, as expected, colour-correcting. Most of the shots were relatively consistent in their white balance, but a couple were inevitably off. Colour-correction can only fix the white balance so far, and so obviously, it still isn't totally consistent. That isn't the main issue we've had with colour-correction, however - we played with colour keying, trying to give the flashback sequences a 'drunken' look. I know Jacob had in mind the effect colour keying has in 'Sin City', but I felt that the effect ought to be less extreme - that it ought to give a clear distinction between reality and the flashbacks without drawing too much attention to itself. Nevertheless, given that the resulting effect makes the distribution of colour within the image somewhat patchy, the effect may well bring more attention to itself than I expected.

Tomorrow, myself and Jacob are going to finalise the edit and get to work on our second project. Luckily, I now have an portable hard drive to edit that piece on, so we don't have to rely on a specific computer being free again...