Production - Editing Part 1: Importing, Organizing, and the Rough Cut

After everything Nicole and I had put into filming, the weather delays, scheduling around Tampa, the reshoot days, all of it, actually sitting down to edit felt like a completely different kind of challenge. I went into post-production thinking the hard part was done and I was dead wrong. Having footage is not the same as having a film, and the distance between those two things is where every real creative decision gets made.

Importing and Organising

The first thing I did before touching a single clip was set up the project structure in Premiere Pro. We had footage from two locations, Nadia's house for the intro sequence and William B. Armstrong Dream Park for everything else, across multiple filming days, with multiple takes and angle variations for each scene. Going into that without a clear folder system would have made finding anything a nightmare.

I created separate bins for each scene called alarm, clothes, salad and shoes, running, crash, argument, ball scramble, falling moment and labeled every clip before I started cutting. It added time at the beginning but saved significantly more time throughout the whole editing process. I didn't understand why organization mattered this much until I was the one trying to find a specific take of a specific angle at 11pm with a deadline approaching. However, I did not remember to save my workspace and one day I had clicked something and lost all of my bins. I did not lose any of the footage, and was able to find them and drag to the timeline same as always, but it just wasn't labelled, so it was a very confusing setback. 

Building the Rough Cut

The rough cut is where you find out what you actually have. Some shots that I remembered as looking great on the day didn't work in context due to reasons like the pacing feeling wrong, or a cut between angles was jarring in a way that wasn't obvious until we saw it in sequence. Other shots that I wasn't sure about during filming turned out to be exactly what the edit needed.

The argument scene required the most work. Editing dialogue is fundamentally different from editing action because the timing is tied to performance and to the specific rhythm of how Nadia and Evan delivered those lines on the day, rather than to movement or visual action. I went through multiple versions of that scene before the cuts felt natural rather than mechanical. The rule I kept coming back to was that the cut should happen where the audience's eye is already moving, not where it's convenient structurally.

Opening montage

The opening montage was the section I found most interesting to edit because it's entirely visual, with no dialogue at all, just images and music. That meant the decisions were purely about pace and rhythm, about how long each shot needed to breathe before the next one. Too fast and the audience doesn't register what they're seeing. Too slow and the energy dies before the film has even started. Finding that balance took more passes than I expected.

The Grey-to-Color Decision

Color-graded grey running scenes

                                                              Golden hues to show contrast

Side by side comparison of research on color grading and how I used it in my film.

One of the most deliberate visual choices I made during the editing process was keeping the running sequence before the collision in muted, slightly grey tones. This was intentional from the beginning of my post-production planning. Audrey's running environment before she bumps into Mattias is controlled, routine, and neutral, showing that she is running her usual route, she is in her own head, everything is exactly as she expects it to be. The desaturated tones reflect that and they communicate stability, containment, normality.

When they crash into each other, the color shifts. The warmer tones I built throughout the rest of the film's color grade come in, and the image feels more alive, more present, more charged. That shift is not something the audience needs to consciously notice, especially because it works below the level of explicit awareness, but it reinforces the emotional meaning of the collision without any dialogue or exposition having to do that work. The moment they meet, her world changes. The color grade reflects that.

This kind of purposeful use of color as a narrative device is something I researched during the planning phase. In my analysis of rom-com cinematography conventions, warm color palettes are consistently used to signal romantic possibility, and cooler or more neutral tones are used to establish the character's emotional state before that possibility arrives and I applied that research directly to this editing decision.