I uploaded the footage, images and audio that my group and Sam had taken on the Elizabeth Castle trip into Adobe Premiere Pro. My focus for this was on the video editing and the sound editing would be done by someone else in the group

I started to organise the video clips into my timeline, removing the audio and stabilising the footage using the warp stabiliser effect in the editor. To start the film, I used a clip I shot before we set off for the castle that was shot to be an establishing shot, although I plan to reshoot this before I finish editing as the camera is too unstable to achieve a clean look. I had this clip fade in from from black to smoothly start the film.

I put together a sequence of the trip on the amphibious bus travelling through the sea before we arrived at the castle gate, which then moves onto a shot of the coast, one of the peak of the castle and the Union Jack flag raised up on a pole. The next segment features one of the ‘British Army’ soldiers working for the castle giving a demonstration on how to operate a 19th Century musket.

This next part of the timeline shows more of the same as the soldier gives the demonstration, however, I also placed clips of the soldier giving a demonstration with one of the castle’s cannons intersecting with these clips to create a build-up as they prepare to fire, before the tension is released with four clips of the weapons firing on different occasions – two of the cannon and musket firing respectively. I used editing techniques such as speed ramping to slow down and speed up the footage and different moments when the musket fires for the first time – slowing down just as it fires, speeding back up after the smoke has mostly cleared. For the cannon’s first shot, I recorded it using the slow-motion camera on my phone, which ended up sacrificing some of the video quality so I could be a safe distance away from the shockwave zone.

I then segued the narrative toward the small war museum in the courtyard, that displays the various artillery used in WWII and in the castle throughout the years, before moving back to more panning shots of different areas and viewpoints of the castle, including staircases, old living quarters, and a view of the coast before slowly fading back to black.

For the sound design of the film, we plan to compose a relatively basic score that creates a sense of adventure across the entire project, focusing more on the ambient sound and a voiceover to provide more context to the shots of the soldier and the museum. We plan to try and rely more on our own sounds that we recorded whilst at the castle, instead of what’s been given to us through Sam’s sound library.