Day 15 Editing

In lesson today, Conor and I darkened some clips of the blood, to make it look as realistic as possible as possible. We felt that when it was darkened it wasn't as shocking and obvious to the reader that the blood was fake, compares to when we had brightened it a lot.

We modified the sound levels of our soundtrack, so that the music does not overpower the voice over and make it hard to hear. When the voice over plays the music is really low and when the voice over stops the music levels pick up. This application in Final Cut enabled me to do this; which was great because our voice over was already quite low when we were recording it.

We continued using Garage Band to create our soundtrack and due to our desire to make the music as precise and synchronous to the clips as possible, it is taking us a long time. After the feedback provided by the year 13 students, our teacher advised us to change the instrument we used in the happy scene as it destabilised the structure we were trying to achieve with our excessive use of flashbacks- the flashbacks appeared to be a lot because the romantic music was contrapuntal to the clips and this distracted our audience from the voice over- now that we have changed the music to be more fast-paced, it is now parallel to our fast paced editing.

Day 14 Editing

In lesson today we peer assesed each others work. Chelsey, Ralph and Dylan peer assesed our work and we did the same to them.
These were their comments:
Conor and I decided to present it in an interview format:




I made the whole of the happy scene clips Black and White in order to create a dream-like sequence and make it more obvious that Sarah is having a flashback...

I used the Radial Blur effect in Final Cut to make the POV shot look more realistic and to emphasise to the audience that Sarah is crying and hurting, the blur is supposed to represent the blur that occurs when a person is crying.

These are the effects we added to the above clip within the violent scenes... They are a lot but the desired effect is what we want and has been created- the blurry, shaky format (that represents tears and fear) is what we were trying to achieve.

I got some Year 13 media students to give us feedback on our opening sequence, they provided constructive criticisms that we later acted upon to improve our opening sequence.



As a result of the feedback I made the clip of Conor 'attacking' Sarah slow motion, so that the domestic abuse issue would be able to be seen by our audience and enable them to see the link between the voice over's statements and the images they see, the green tabs show the clip has been slowed down- hopefully the choice of slowing the clip down would get rid of this confusion:

Day 13 Editing

Today, Conor worked on our soundtrack for a bit whilst I worked on the voice over. 

I split the voice over into parts in order to make it synchronous to the images our audience will view.

 As a result the words in the voice over are expressed a lot more strongly, and hopefully it will be noticed a lot more by our audience and create a lot more questions within them, in regards to the reasons to the images that they see and their attempt to find the correlation between the images that they are viewing and the cynicism they hear in her voice-adding to our enigma codes. 

Before I had split the voice over to make it parallel to the images in the screen, our teacher felt that our voice over was too dramatic and the person that was the voice over sounded more happy than sad or angry, but when I had synced the voice over to the image, the voice sounded a lot more angry. Also I had informed Conor that at a particular time in the clip with the voice over there needs to be "hard" music that connotes violence playing, and when we played the clips, voice over and soundtrack together the voice over's angry emotion was expressed a lot more and the overall effect was quite captivating.

We started to experiment with the colour balance of our clips in order to change the colour of our blood and make it look as realistic as possible 

This is an example of one of the clips we changed the colour of the blood by moving the dot within the circle to the red region.

We brightened up the blood {shown in the bathroom scene} in some of our clips in order to try and make it look as realistic as possible.
We only brightened up some of our clips, so that when the fast-paced jump cuts occur they will stand out a lot more. Also it was the clips in the beginning we brightened up and the ones later on we left with no effect in order to form the juxtaposition between light and dark and to visually create the harshness of Sarah's voice over tone. So her voice gets more bitter and harsher, therefore the clips get darker and become quicker (representing the psychological aspect of our film's genre).

BEFORE:

AFTER:

BEFORE:

AFTER:

(but we felt this effect looked too dull and did not make the blood stand out or look as realistic as it could so we brightened it up)

AFTER:

BEFORE:

AFTER:

BEFORE:

AFTER:

I managed to ask my mum her view on the blood and the effect we had made, and the impact it would have on her,  as a audience.

Her view/feedback was that:

Our blood did not look realistic, even when it was brightened up and that it looked really pink, and that for some of the clips it would be best if we left them as dark as they were originally because even though they were still a bit pink as well ( especially the ones in the sink) at least the blood on my hand still looked a bit more red and therefore more realistic.

When she stated this and expressed her points to me, I agreed that indeed brightening up the images made the blood look even more fake and more obvious that it was paint that we used (only now it looks like we used pink paint instead of red).
I will give this feedback to Conor as well and as a pair we will make the decision on whether or not to act on her constructive criticism.

Film Opening Development

Conor and I are making comments regarding our production, we are talking about the improvements that we could make and how our opening sequence is turning out...



PowerPoint of Our Film Development, with our success criteria:

Film Opening Development by EnnySilva

Day 12 Editing

We did the voice over today straight onto Final Cut because I couldn't access the clip, we had originally created on Photo booth, because it would not Export.

The voice over script has changed slightly from...

"Every girl enjoys fairytales. Especially Cinderella's.

They love the idea of a Prince Charming who is prepared to whisk them off to a lifetime of bliss and wonder:- you know the line...'and they all lived happily ever after; The end.'

The end? Is that it...?

Not even close... What they forget to tell every girl is the fact that Prince Charming is non-existent,  so you settle for a mimic, a wannabe, a fake, a poser, an IMPOSTER!!"

To...

"Every girl enjoys fairytales. Especially Cinderella's.
They love the idea of a Prince Charming who is prepared to whisk them off to a lifetime of bliss and wonder:- you know the line...'and they all lived happily ever after; The end.'
The end? Is that it...?
Not even close... What they forget to tell every girl is the fact that Prince Charming is non-existent,  so you settle for a mimic, a fraud, a wannabe, an IMPOSTER!!"

We reduced the number of comparisons Sarah uses, because we felt that it was too descriptive and too long and might therefore bore and not create intrigue within our audience and we also thought that "fraud" was a better description that summarised the words "fake and poser" really well. Furthermore, we though that the word "poser" was too alike to the title "IMPOSTER!!"

We continued working on our soundtrack...we want to make sure that every moving image is synchronous to our soundtrack so we looked at the duration of each clip and made the sound equally as long. 

The duration of our opening sequence is exactly, this means we are within the 2 minutes benchmark:

Day 11 Editing

We were experimenting with the placements of our title sequence, I tried to make the placements of our titles unique and put them on items within the frame, to give the appearance that the names were a part of the scene. For example,  with my name I placed it on the soap dispensor and the colours I used helped to emphasise this appearance.

I had originally planned to place my name in the middle of the soap dispensor, but Conor though it looked better placed on the side and I agreed.

 

 This is how my name is place now, however the orange tint in the background has been changed to black and this change (in my opinion) makes our production look a lot more professional.

We blurred the violent scenes, we tried to look for the blur effect that will make the clips look like they are from the viewpoint of a person in tears (the clip is a POV shot of Sarah in tears, as James prepares to hurt her, a teary blu would have made the POV shot more realistic and therefore more effective). However either we could not find this effect or it was unavailable. So we looked for an alternative and settled with a normal blur with an earthquake effect- the effect was still good and did not deter from the overall effect we wanted to create. 

Conor has started creating the music, that will hopefully be synchronous with our opening sequence clips.

Film Company Logos Analysis

Conor and I have made our Film Company logo using LiveType, and our teacher thought it would still be a good idea to analyse film company logos, as it could further inspire the creation of our logo.




We made our logo colourful in order to represent the positive aspects of our personality to our audience, and our aims for future productions. 

The connotations of our chosen colours are:

• Gold/ Brown: The gold represents our desire to be the best in all our media productions and the brown represents our ability to endure.
• Blue: The blue represents the purity and truthfulness in the form of the realism and therefore rawness of our production subject (domestic violence).
• Purple: The purple represents the mystery of our production, the hidden ideas that we have and want to create. That can only be shared when we create more films. The purple is a representation of all the different genres of films with different narratives that we continually form in later productions. 
• Pink: The pink represents our aim to recreate life in our productions without being stereotypical (so we try to subvert negative stereotypes).

I used...

http://www.three-musketeers.net/mike/colors.html#r/w

...as a guide for the connotations of our chosen colours.

Film company logos are really useful in a film production because they enable the audience to easily recognise the film company, especially if they continue to make films that interest them. It also associates the company with the actual film- so if the actual film was positively received by critics and the audience then so would the production company and as a result of 'association' then the company would be acclaimed and it would be highly likely that the next film they make would be watched as a result.







I noticed that a number of film company logos that are popular and easily recognisable have similar features, such as simplicity which resulted in effortless recognition by the audience. There was also a link between the name of the company and the image (if they used an image). For example 'DreamWorks' Film Company has a background image of the sky with the stars in the night time, this image connotes sleep and peace in the night time, which usually results in dreams and links back to their company name. In addition the logo expresses to the audience the kind of company they are (what the company is about/their personality) - a company that is likely to cherish new ideas (which people usually get when they are asleep and dream), and visually re-creates, in the form of entertainment, what many people feel they can only dream about.    

I think that the company logo reveals a snippet of the company to the audience in a few seconds of them viewing the logo, which should characterise the company. The logo is extremely important because it would continually be associated with the company and the image, the font and the colour of the font are important aspects of any film production company.

Day 10 Editing

We did quite a lot in lesson today, although we have not yet finished our title sequence-which we started today. 

We used Art of the Tittle's "Murder by Death" screenshots as a guide as to how we were going to show our titles, because we were unsure as to exactly how the titles were decided and the orders they were placed. Using 'Murder by Death' as a template/guide we also plan to follow their structure:

• 101 Production Presents
• A Miss Butler Production
• We do not reveal the title until right at the end of our opening sequence when Sarah's voice over says it.
• Then actors names 
• Written by
• Directed by...

We used Art of the Title because we wanted our production to be as close to a real title sequence as possible, therefore making our overall production effective and hopefully impressive. I had already analysed a title sequence but I focused more on the way the names were framed within the shots and the effectiveness of it, than the format they were written in. So that's why I was unsure as to how the producers and directors were written in, for example. 

When filming this scene and others like it,we had to make sure that the camera could not be seen in the mirror as well, because it would have completely ruined our continuity editing.
We noticed that the actors names just appear by themselves and do not appear: "Eniola Silva as Sarah." Which was the way we had originally planned to write the actors names. 
This would not have helped our production look more professional and 'flow' in the screen, but because we amended that issue we can see a difference in the way the presentation of the names are in the screen, the effect is a lot more cleanly cut and professional . 

Day 9 Editing

Day 8 Editing

Day 7 Editing