Blog Post #49 - Shortening the Driveway Scene

 In my project, the driveway scene is a vital part of the story, as it ends off my project, and would transition into a scene of Ed and Fern speaking if it were to continue. The problem lies in the fact that my recording of it is too long, taking nearly 50 seconds just to pull out of the driveway and to drive down the road. 

I plan to shorten this scene by using editing techniques such as speeding up the clip, moving audio to another part of the shot, and using jump cuts and dissolve transitions to convey the passing of time, as I wrote about in Blog Post #2 - Jump Cuts, although for a different scene now.

This is the full 47-second shot I must shorten to around 20 seconds.

Below is the edited shot, which I got down to about 18 seconds, which is around the time I was hoping for out of this scene.

To achieve this effect on the scene, I split up the clip into 3 parts, deleting the parts in between. These 3 parts were Fern stepping into the car, the time from when the car started moving backward from when it was halfway down the driveway, and when the car started moving down the road. 

I used a cross-blur transition between the first two parts, since the only thing that had moved between the two clips was the sky, and a cross-dissolve transition between the two latter parts to convey the passing of time through the movement of the car and the blur. 

I also applied a 20% speed increase to the second and third parts of the scene in order to further reduce the amount of time the scene takes. Given this, I separated the audio of the car starting in order to keep that the same. I then overlayed this audio into the beginning of the second part in order to make it sound and feel natural. 

I used iMovie to edit this scene since it comes with my laptop, which I will also be using to edit the rest of my final cut. Below is a screenshot of what this looks like in iMovie.