Minor Project - The Conjuring 2 Edit

The forth and final clip I was editing for my minor project was The Conjuring 2 (2016). This clip is taken from a horror film, and gives a very intense and suspenseful performance from all aspects and areas of the footage. It's very eery and uses both its audio and visuals to pull in it's audience and to scare them at the end. The scene itself is quite isolated and features a young girl watching television alone, when things start to get unusual. For this specific piece I used the footage of the clip on three different layers, with the first been the original and the other two able to edit on. With the clip being a horror film, I wanted to give the edit and very olden feel but I also didn't wanna add to the suspense or help the horror film in anyway. I added very small but noticeable scanlines to the piece and cut off the sides of the piece, using the left to right tool. I used the border control effect and removed the edges and sides of the clip and had the original footage playing underneath, giving a sharp distinction where the two clips meet. I also cut directly down the middle of the clip, and took away a lot of the colour from the right side, almost making it black and white, while the left side still had complete colour. After adjusting and changing certain aspects of the colour already, I decided to apply my colour effect technique and make minimal changes to the colour, just enough to take away some of the eeriness that the clip has earned.

In an effort to break tension, but my have ultimately done the opposite, I added cuts in between the footage, some short, some longer, and this was cutting to black throughout the clip while the sound was still playing. This was to raise frustration out of the audience that they can hear but can completely not see what is happening in such a tense situation.

After finishing on the visual adjustments to the clip, I moved on to alter the audio for the piece. Audio is so important in horror films and there is no exception here. The audio is quite and important element in this piece and I wanted to take that away from the clip completely. Many horror films are known for using infrasound in their films to create suspense and make the audience uncomfortable so I wanted to cancel this out. I used an audio file of airplane cabin sounds which is used among many people to calm themselves down and supposed to ease peoples nerves, so I added this quietly underneath the original audio. For the original audio I used Avid's own audio tool D-Verb, and adjusted the settings to give the audio a very faint relay and echo, slight ambient effect to make it sound like the audios coming from another room, and this really worked collectively to produce a low quality sound track for the visuals.

This is my forth and final piece of editing for my minor project and I'm very happy with how all the final edits turned out. I think its good that you can see a progression through all the clips, and that there not all just edited the same, you can see certain techniques done better and new effects that completely change the outcome of the piece. This was a good edit challenge for me to take and has elevated my editing skills and game for future productions.