Post-Production: Editing

 This is our group's editing blog. This blog was done entirely by Kenneth

I use Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects 2025 for the editing of this project.

I began editing as soon as we finished shooting. Initially, I started off in After Effects, where I color graded the raw footages to look like nighttime.

Before

After

I found this Youtube video explaining the process, and it really helped a lot. Though, I ended up tweaking the little details of the color grading settings to achieve a result of my liking.

I also experimented with light leaks, which I had planned to apply on some shots.

I again made use of a Youtube video explaining the process of achieving this.

But shortly after, I found out that putting it against a black background makes for a really unique shot, much better than putting it straight above the shots. So, I decided to use this for the first few seconds into the opening credits of the movie intro. I chose a simple fade animation for the credit texts.

Moving on to Premiere Pro, I placed all the dark version shots that I wanted to use for this movie intro, and aligned them in order on the timeline.

Then, I added vignettes to all the shots and made some more changes to the color grading, which in the end improved the look of the shots and make them feel more cinematic.

At first, I had the idea of having voiceover throughout the movie intro, as if a mind-reading machine is being used to enter the mind of the killer, in hopes of finding the truth behind the murder. And we as the audience watches through the POV of the machine entering the mind. I even went on to create a wormhole on After Effects, which I had planned to use at the very beginning of the intro, when the device enters the killer's mind for the first time.

This is thanks to a Youtube video tutorial I found at the time.

But after discussing with my team members, we decided to drop this idea, since the mind reading device plot doesn't suit horror that well, and leans more into sci-fi.


Meanwhile, choosing the right audio was also quite a challenge. I initially had footstep sounds play at the first few seconds of the intro, then followed by a swoosh sound as the wormhole plays. But, dropping the mind-reading device plot meant choosing a different set of audio as well.


Picking and rearranging shots on the timeline was also a back-and-forth task, with new ideas cancelling the previous arrangement. But in the end, I found the arrangement of shots that I loved and sticked with that.


Finally, I opted for a creepy-sounding music to play throughout the whole intro, and I found the perfect one to do just that. I used this music as a base for the timing of the transitions between shots.


So far I've used several moon stock videos at some points of the intro, which I really loved. But halfway through the editing process, my media teacher reviewed the edit and told me to not use stock footages, so I removed the moon shots and opted for our own shots of lighter instead.


The rest of the editing process went smooth from then on, and most of the clips were arranged based on the beat of the audio I chose for this intro.


There's one particular clip that I put extra work on, which is this shot below.

The silhouette of the killer behind the main character is actually fake. It's an image that I tracked into the shot using the "3D Camera Tracker" feature available in After Effects. I wouldn't say the addition of the silhouette is perfect, since it is static, but it definitely helped intensifies this last scene of the movie intro.


Meanwhile, for the main title animation, I initially considered going for a bluish theme.

But at this point, my teammates suggested me to change the font to a scratchier hand-written style to further enhance the horror feel. And with a different font in use, I ended up changing the main title animation as well, to this blood-dripping style from the Youtube video below.

End result, with new font and animation

Self reflection:

I gave Kenneth ideas for the main film title which included a bloody title with red color. The change from the normal to the handwritten scratchy font was also a suggestion from me and max and overall I think kenneth execution of these suggestion and ideas are good and also align with the overall conventions of a horror movie. Maybe next time I could physically help the editor at work. 

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