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

During this week we re recorded our voice over to finalise it and make it a bit longer. We used Chrlotte as the police officer and me as the mother because it was the eaisest and convenient situation.

We have also edited our voice over to distort the surname of the victim, similar to that of Plan B in his song Suzanne. We also put more effects over it to make it sound eery and mysterious. We timed all of the parts of the voice over to fit our film and realised that we do not have enough to fit. We decided that we should make some kind of sound track to fill the gaps and used garage band to add sounds and melodies together to create some background noise for inbetween bits of the voice over. We just now need to move the music and voice over from garage band over to imovie and make it all fit in together with our film.

Our voice over

We started to record some of our voice over the other day by using three people to read our script that we roughly made. Abby was the news reporter, Emily was the mother and Charlotte read the parts of the police officer. We recorded it on garage band just roughly to see what it's like but we may need to re record in the future if it doesnt properly fit.

From using the idea from Plan B's song, Suzanne, we decided to distort the girls surname on the news report using effects on garage band. By doing this is makes it sound more real as if we cannot say her full name for legal reasons and makes it seem more eery.

We also recorded the part for the beginning of the rolling tape.

We put the rolling tape and a small bit of the news report onto imovie to see what it's like and we will complete it when we go back to school after Easter.

This is the draft with parts of the voice over in it:

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:

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:

Second draft

We started to edit in some of the parts of Charlotte waking up into our film. At the moment this is very rough and we need to add lots more colour parts in and maybe slow them down rather than speed them up. We also need to take out the part with the clock as the lighting does not fit in with the rest of the film

Here is our second draft

Editing and our first draft

Today in our lesson we uploaded all of our new footage onto the macs to look at what we had and what we still needed. So far we have only really filmed some parts for our flashbacks but we decided to put them together to see what they look like and see if we liked them.
We started off by putting a long clip of when we were driving in the car onto imovie and speeding it up. We also put the clip into black and white because we want to have all of the flashbacks in black and white and then the person waking up in colour to show the time difference. This is simlilar to what happened in Casino Royale when all of the scenes before the opening credits were in black and white to show that it was from the past and then after the credits it went back to colour to show it was then present day.
After speeding up the clip of Enfield Town through the car window, we then started putting random very short clips of other things we filmed all the way through the car scene to break it up. We started off with the traffic lights turning from red to green but as the clips are all in black and white we are hoping to find a way that we can make the background black and white but make the colours from the traffic lights stand out.
After adding a couple of other shots into it we decided our shots were too long still so we started adding more and more in until the whole thing was very fast paced and choppy.
Some of the shots we added were:
* A person's eyes in the mirror of the car
* Sarah running into the phonebox
* The public footpath sign
* Sarah's point of view running through the field
* A point of view shot of someone walking through branches
* A close up of the steering wheel
* A close up of the radio and a hand changing the station
* A low angled shot looking up at the sky when a flock of birds flew over
* Me running over the camera into the distance
* Sarah from above in the phone box
* Some different people just walking through the street that we filmed from the car windows

This is our very first draft of our new film:



Our group was really pleased with this draft and I am already enjoying this film a lot more than our original. We need to film a bit more footage, including when the character actualyl wakes up which we are planning to do one day next week after school as we were unable to all make it on Wednesday.

Our original film beginning

This is the first draft of our film opening that we decided to scrap.
You can see from this draft that we have been playing around with imovie with different effects to try to edit our film.
After completing this first draft we decided we really did not like it.
Some of the shots we liked and thought could be quite effective, but others were just too long and boring.

The first shot where Sarah's dad opens the door to the dark room was quite effective because when he turns on the light it takes a while to focus completely which could be quite creepy as it takes the viewer a while to realise where he actually is.

The next shot from inside the dark room i really did not like. I don't think we focused enough on our board of photos that we made as we only really look at one. The pan that is used is not as effective as we thought as it is quite unsteady. It is also really hard to see what is going on in this scene when Sarah's dad is developing the photo's. This shot is far too long and boring and to make it better we needed to add in different angle shots of what he was doing to make it more interesting and understandable, which we did not realise at the time. As we had to edit this scene to make it lighter so you could see what was happening, the light went quite grainy which I don't think looks very professional or effective.

The next scene of the house and Sarah's dad walking into the shot had some good points and some bad points. I like the way that he just strolls into the shot and looks at the house as he walks past as I think it is quite eery. I do not like the effect we put on it however as it does not look realistic. I also again think that this shot is too long and we should have filmed it from different angles to cut it up.

The shot of Charlotte walking out of the house I thought was quite good because we placed the camera in a position so you could see Charlotte and her stalker at the same time which made it quite effective. The continuity in this shot however is not very good as when Charlotte walks out of the house she walks towards the camera and then turns which does not look realistic and we did not pick up on at the time.
For this shot we did film it from different angles to make sure it wasn't too long which was a good idea and I do think that part is quite effective.

The next part of Charlotte being followed down the allyway again is too long and boring and we found it really hard to try and match the two shots from the different points of view to make it look continuous which again makes it look unprofessional. It also changes effects each time the camera moves positon which makes it look wrong and uneffective.

The last shot where Sarah's dad is back in the darkroom is again too dark so we can not see what is going on and we positioned the camera in a bad place which meant that Sarah's dad was infront of the camera for most of the shot so we could not see what he was doing anyway. The photo's that we took of ourselves to use as our credits were far too dark so you cannot even see what the photo's are meant to be when we were filming it. The light we used in this scene was a phone light but it kept going off every few seconds. At the time that we were filming this we thought that it may looks quite creepy and effective but now that we have put it together is does not looke effective it just again looks unprofessional.

I think we have definatly made the right decision to re make our film as I hope we can do better than our first draft. We have gained experience and knowledge from our first go and now we know that we cannot make our shots too long and we need to have many different camera angles to add in to make it interesting and get the effect we are aiming for.