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:

Almost finished film opening

Our film opening must be finished by the end of the week so we have been finalising our voice over and music and have almost finished it now. In our last lesson we editing some of the music that was on our previous draft and made the bird noise quieter as it was quite over powering and made it sound quite fake. We also faded the music together more so it had more of a flow to it and sounded better. We also deleted the clips that were put in of Charlotte at the end in the mirror so that it ends on just Charlotte walking down the path as this looks more effective.
We just have to make a few more changes to our music by making it a bit quieter as the voice over is sometimes drowned out by the music at points and then this will hopefully be our final edit of our coursework.

This is the draft of our film with the music and voiceover put together:

Background music

After recording our voice over and putting it to our film we realised that it did not fill up our film and we had really big gaps that we needed to figure out a way to fill. We decided to make some fast tension music to put in the background throughout our film.
We used garage band so that it was not copyrited and then tried to fit it to our film to make it fit.
This is our next draft of our film opening with the music included.

Voice over discussions

We've decided that we can use the opening of "The life of David Gale" as an idea for our voice over by starting it when the black screen is up for our credits. We all agreed that this was an effective way to start a film as you are introduced to the story even before you see any characters physically.

Molly also had an idea that we could start our voiceover with the sound of a tape being put on to be recorded like it is in a police interview. This could be the first sound that our viewers hear when the black screen starts. I think this will be really effective and now we just need to start recording our voiceover and match it to our film.

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.

Voice over decision

On friday our group further discussed our voice over as we have decided we need to start recording it as soon as possible.
We thought that to make our film a bit more creepy we could make out that the girls' mother is the person who has put her there as she has some kind of problem. We decided that we could show this in the voice over by having a police interview with the mother where she is asked questions and answers them in ways that suggests she is quite strange and innocent by changing her tone of voice to change moods and by some of the answers she gives.
We thought that we could also still use the idea of the news report as well in the style of Plan B. We could have the news report cut up into 4 parts and have it over the parts of our credits. This way it would give our film some variety.
We have started to think about a script and who we can ask to do the voice over for us and hopefully we can record it some time soon using the microphones at school.

We also decided that we will need quiet background music to go with our voiceover but we want to keep it simple so the viewer is not distracted from the voiceover. We could prehaps just have a slight heart beat or something similar to that.

Voice overs

Our group discussed our voice over that we want to put on our film and we spoke about all of the possibilities we have. We thought that we could make the voice over similar to the content of our film by having different voice clips cut up and put together. For example, parts of a police interview, parts of a news report, parts of a conversation the girl is having with a friend, parts of a conversation the person who put her there is having and maybe some of the girls relatives and friends speaking about it.
We thought of some possible voices that we could use for these ideas and made a list of some people at school and some teachers we thought would be good to ask.
We need to talk more deeply about our ideas but I think it will work out well and hopefully sound good with our film.
An idea that we had for an example of a good television or radio report is in Plan B's song Suzanne. The song is about the Camden Ripper who raped and killed 3 prostitues. Towards the end of the song there is a news reporter who is talking about the case and the reason why we liked this was because the names were blocked out which made it seem quite creepy

This is the song Suzanne:

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:

Our film title

We have been thinking of ideas to what to name our film when it is completed and have tried to think of something effective and relevant to our film and what it is about.
Whilst we were on the font website looking for one to download to use for our credits, we saw that one of the fonts was called "Pulse". We thought that this could be a possible name for our film as there is a clip of Charlotte whist she is on the floor of her chest going up and down to indicate her heavy breathing. As we are hoping to film to be eery and quick paced we thought that Pulse may be a suitable name for it and we could also relate our background music to it by having a heart beat or something similar.
We have put this film name into our third draft and all think it looks quite effective but if we think of a different name that we all agree is better we may change it later on.

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:

Discussions about our film

In todays lesson we spoke to Miss Foster about our film, showed her where we were up to and ask for her opinion.
As we were speaking about our film she could see that we clearly were not very happy with how our film has turned out so far as we kept making comments on how the lighting was not quite right and our shots were too long or confusing. As we were talking we discussed the option that maybe we could reshoot another film that was better and not as complicated with the story line. As a group we decided that maybe we did rush into our first film too quickly and it would be wise to think about starting again with our storyboard and thinking about it all more carefully. We've decided to look at all the possible genres we can do, look at films that fit into that genre, and come up with a rough idea for each one and then decide which idea is best and will work most succesfully. We started to do this in todays lesson and came up with some rough genres such as "supernatural" for example, Paranormal Activity and Signs, "psychological" such as Donnie Darko and The Sixth Sense and "spoofs" such as Scary Movie.
We have not made anymore progress yet but we are going to carry on working on our ideas and hopefully come up with a better, more structured idea than our first. We realise that by comitting to making a whole new film, we will have to work really hard to get our blogs back up to date and to keep in the time frame. We are hoping to come up with an effective story that we can easily shoot over just a couple of days in the Christmas holidays which are coming up in about 2 weeks.

Editing

We've put our raw footage onto our mac at school and have started to edit.
After first watching our filming we realised that the lighting in the dark room is very dark and quite hard to see what is exactly going on. We decided to try and lighten the scenes and put a red tint over the shots to make it look lighter but still have an eery feel with the red lights. I think that this was really effective so we have written down everything that we have done to the clips so we can make it consistant throughout our film. We also decided that our outside scenes were very bright and did not really add to our scary theme. We also realised that the clouds from the outside scenes are not consistent because when each shot changes, so does the clouds. We edited this, again using imovie by making the scenes greyer and the sky white so you cannot see the changing clouds and the scenes have a more gloomy eery feel. We have only just started editing so we only have the first few seconds edited together but so far I am really enjoying and can't wait to continue making our film come together.