Foster Creative Deep Dive: Our Highlight Film Editing Process
You know that feeling you get when you watch a really good elopement or wedding film? Yeah, that feeling. Excitement, wonder, deep understanding. Often when we talk with you, one thing we hear time and time again is that many of you feel like you knew the couple getting married when you see their highlight film. As far as compliments go, we appreciate few greater than that, and today we want to spend some time breaking down the steps that go into creating a stunning elopement highlight film! The images we use in this post are all images taken from an actual Foster Creative editing project, from Kiara & Mason’s snowy winter elopement! We’re all for spoilers, so please take a moment to watch Kiara & Mason’s elopement highlight film for reference to our process!
Step 1 | Organize & Prep
“Dumping Cards” is a term commonly used in creative industries to describe the act of transferring photos / videos shot previously to an editor’s computer and hard drive.
As soon as we finish filming your elopement, we take out our cameras, audio recorders, and drones back to our office and begin “dumping cards". We organize every couple’s media files into “footage” and “audio” categories, and we build most of the highlight film with only what we captured on your wedding day! Once footage and audio has been transferred to our working project hard drives, we back up the footage immediately. We then “prep” our project file for our prep editor, who takes the new project file to begin the next phase of the process, where our prep editor finds all the best footage.
Step 2 | Culling Footage & Selecting Cuts
“Clips, cuts, and selects” are terms we use to describe our video footage (clips), the sections we “cut” out of them, and the remaining usable footage (selects).
Where would we be without our wonderful prep editors!? (Looking at you Bree Woolly <3) Our prep editors are an essential and unique component to our highlight film editing process, and essentially our prep editors job is to look over the full wedding day, while locating the very best video clips and audio clips for Steven to use when he sits down to build the highlight film. Using a two-sequence video editing process, our prep editor will dump all of our footage on one sequence. Then, they will playback the footage, making “cuts” out of our “clips”, and then moving the good cut onto the second sequence. When finished, we’re left with two sequences—one with all the rejected footage, and one with of the “select” footage, that Steven will use to build the highlight film!
Step 3 | Building the Storyline: Ceremony Audio & Music
Finally, our project returns home! From Step 3 on out, Steven handles 100% of the editing. Steven begins by scanning through and organizing the selected footage his prep editor prepared for him, before editing the ceremony footage and audio himself! Steven listens for audio that he feels will bring out strong emotion, and then arranges his audio selects on a new sequence, called “Highlight Film”. Now, Steven searches for just the right music—the right sounds, to bring out the couple’s personality, and to enhance the audio selects he’s already placed. Finally, Steven plays with positioning to ensure that the voices and music are synced together in a way that feels natural. The storyline has been placed.
Step 4 | Add Cinematic Footage & Transitions
Steven now enters the most creative, time consuming and difficult stage of the editing process, where he will spend at least a couple of work days trying to express a beautiful elopement day in about 4 to 5 minutes. We use all of our best footage, custom transitions, and creative spirit to build in the emotional landscapes, beautiful dress shots and gorgeous sunset clips that make Foster Creative’s highlight films stunning.
Step 5 | Footage Coloring and Enhancement
Cinematographers & Filmmakers use a “LUT”, or a look-up table, as the foundation of film color! Through a process of color addition, we film our couples using a “flat” color-profile, or a very ugly, grey looking color that is waiting to have color added in post-production, as it’s much easier to add color than to remove it from film. Though coloring film shares a lot of commonalities with photography, there is quite a bit more to it than digital photo editing.
Once the highlight film has been completely built out, we’ll spend the next few hours going over every video and audio clips individually, to enhance its composition, motion, focus point, and more. We do anything we need to to ensure the clip looks its very best before applying our film color, through a process called adding a “LUT”. Always the final step in our highlight process, as soon as we’ve colored our film, it’s finished and ready to view!
What other questions do you have about our editing process? Email us at steven@wearefostercreative.com if you have any other questions!
