Finalising our film

In our last lesson before moderation we had to finalise our film and make it perfect ready to be moderated. We edited our credits so that the last name would stay on the screen for a few seconds after flashing numerous times. This enables viewers to clearly see the names and read them. We also made all the background music quieter so that you can hear the voice over more clearly.

We then uploaded our film into youtube in HD which made our credits look clearer and more realistic as a real film.

This is our final edit of our two minute film opening coursework, Leyla:

New draft

After watching the different film openings to look at the different types of credits and their positions in the films we decided that we should follow the opening to a film that Charlotte had recently watched "Step Brothers" We all agreed that the order of their credits worked well and we liked them so we made ours similar to theirs.

This is the link to the opening of Step Brothers:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sczh_KjjFNU

We decided that our production company name could be "mac one" for the simple fact that we are working on the first mac at school and we came up with a simple 3 letter combination of LBC for another distributor.
We put all of our names at the beginning as well to see what it looked like but after putting it on youtube we decided they looked better a bit more spaced out and we also need to give eachother roles in the production and add that on

Here is our next draft:

Film Opening looking at credits

In class we looked at a few different film openings to look at where they positioned theyre credits and what kinds of other things they had such as the distributors and production companies names.

In the film "Derailed" the opening was in a prison and the first thing you saw was a black screen with "Miramax" production company. As the action started the credits appeared on the screen over the moving image. First it was the names of all the technical team, then the director, the main actor and actress' name, the title of the film and then the rest of the actors.

In another film "The life of David Gale" the credits were quite different and this time the production companies were "Universal" and "Intermedia". There is then a black screen with the distributors names on and a black screen for the tutle of the film. This is all before any action starts and there is a sound bridge over the black screen to introduce you to the conversation before you see any actors.

In another film opening that we watched "Bourne Identity" this opening was again slightly different with the credits. In this one the production company is again "Universal" but this time there is a little bit of action and then a black screen with the name of the film and no actors names are shown in the opening.


After watching these openings it made us discuss our own credits and decided that the name of our film should come right at the beginning rather than at the end to make it look more like a film than a trailer. We also decided that we should give each person in our film a role such as editor, producer etc to make it look more authentic.

Forth draft of our film and film name

Our group were adding some more touches to our editing and decided that we would like to change the name of our film as we did not like Pulse. We decided that we could have use the name of the girl who has been left in the woods as the film is centred around her. We also thought about the recent film Chloe that has been brought out which uses a similar technique for the name and we all thought it was quite effective. After thinking about names and looking on baby name websites, as a group we decided on the name Leyla for our film.

This is our forth edit:

Credits

Over the past two lessons of editing we have completed making our credits and edited some more of our opening.
After hearing Miss Foster's comments on our opening draft we have changed some things to help to make it more understandable to the audience.
We have changed the very beginning by adding colour clips of Charlotte in to make it easier to understand that she is alseep and she is having a dream/flashbacks.
We also decided to play with the effects in imovie and see if there was an effective alternative to black and white as this is quite boring. We decided to use an effect called "Old World" and also turn down the saturation which makes the colour look drained similar to that in the film I blogged about earlier "Premonition". We cut out some of the driving car scenes from the film and replaced them with other things as we all agreed the car parts were repeated too often.
Another bit of editing we done was put short fades inbetween the colour parts of Charlotte and when it goes to the flashbacks almost as an ellipsis to show there is a time differece.

For our credits we tried to base them on the credits of the film se7en which we all really like and enjoy. The credits create an eery feel to the film and set the mood. The actors, directors and producers names all come up on a black background with white writing which jumps and jerks around the screen. In this picture you can see the type of font they used in the opening credits of Se7en:


We decided to try and create the same kind of effect for our film. As we were looking through the fonts provided on imovie we decided that they were all to basic and not effective enough for our film so we tried to see if we could download a font from the internet. We found the website www.dafont.com which has loads of different fonts to choose from. We were searching the site and all the different themes to find something that would suit the genre of our film.
Some of the examples of the fonts we liked were:






In the end after carefully looking at all of the fonts we liked we decided that the most appropriate one for our film is Sketched:



We downloaded this font to our mac and started putting together our credits. We used black screens and added the text to it. We made all the texts only appear for about half a second each and for each one we slightly moved it or adjusted it in some way so when it's played it creates a flickering jolting effect.
We're really pleased with our credits and after spending a long time on them all agree that it was worth it. We also like that they are longer clips so it contrasts all of our other short choppy clips and gives the film some variety.

This is our third draft of our film: