Rough Cut

Once we had all the shots ready, we were now suppose to shot list the best ones. At first I had no experience of Adobe Premiere but once I opened my own project therein, it felt like the entire work space was mine to work on. So I began importing shots and lining them up in respective layers neatly so as to avoid any chaos in the future. Once this was done, I began cutting through shots while managing the audio as we didn't have any voice overs to be synced in later on. While cutting through my shots, I faced a major obstacle in cutting my shots abruptly, so much so that it was becoming very obvious to the audience. Many a times I had to re-import shots so as to rework them into proper, usable shots. This was one tedious task as our shots were a little too long and cutting them from here and there was one messy work. Once, after taking one entire week of editing, I had my rough cut ready without a background score, it was a major relief as we had little time left and the rough cut alone had taken a little too long in its making. Then came the task of putting in a background score. This we had finalised very early on in our short film production to be a tabla instrumental and that score too was shot listed already so all we were to do now, was put it in and sync it with the video. During this process, I learnt the usage of cross-fading, audio gains and speed/duration as they helped add the desired effects in our films. I also faced many problems during this, like the cutting of the shot's audio while working on the background score if they landed mistakenly on the same layer. More than thrice, I had to redo the entire scene's editing owing to trouble with the background score. My rough cut without the background score was 12 minutes and once the audio was imported, the file was 9 mins long. This worried me immensely as the video had no effects, no titles, no credits, no logo as yet. How were we to shorten it when all its major conventions threatened more length. Putting this fear aside, I now began working on my final cut with the editing and everything and hoped that the length wont be a trouble. Here is a copy of our rough cut:

Abeera from Abira and Dua on Vimeo.