Deciding to change

Although I have received positive feedback from pretty much all of the people I have shown my rough cut to, I still think that I need to change it. At the moment, I think that the opening of my film is a little bit monotonous. It doesn't make as much of an impact that I hoped for and I'm not sure that I like what has been said in the voice over - i.e. I'm not sure if I have given too much away. I think I am going to re-write the script and re-do the voiceover as well as play around with the order of shots to try and create a more interesting and memorable piece of film.

Progress - Colour correction

Since creating my rough cut, I have shown it to a few people who would fit my target audience to get some feedback. At the moment, all feedback has been positive but as I watched the opening more and more, the more things I saw that needed to be changed. For one, I realised that the lighting isn't very continuous in brightness and contrast so I edited most of the clips to try and make all the shots have the same light intensity. Some shots I have had to make darker and when shown next to the original shot, they look worse purely because the edits are darker than the originals but I need the setting to be dark as it is meant to be night time and by making all the shots slightly darker, I have managed to achieve the same kind of light intensity in all the shots.



Before colour correction



After colour correction



Before colour correction

After colour correction

Before colour correction

After colour correction

Before colour correction

After colour correction

The main thing that I wanted to edit was the shot of the close up writing in the middle of the film opening. Originally, I applied a mask to the text in After Effects and made it so everything was blurry apart from the words that Lia is reading in ther voice over at the time. Unfortunately, when I tried to export this experiment, it didn't work and the mask kept blacking out the text totally and it didn't work so I had to come up with another plan. I ended up applying another mask but feathering the picture so that the outside of the shot was dark and the text was light and therefore highlighted.

Writing before edit



Writing after edit



Rough cut complete!

After many hours of filming, editing and creating, I have a rough cut of my film opening completed. I have put together all the decent and usable footage that I had along with the music and voice overs and I now have a film opening which I can show to people to gain feedback. However, because I have not yet obtained permission from the composer of the song for my titles, I will post the film opening on here without the music from the titles as I do not want to be subject to any copyright offences.

At the moment, my rough cut is only just two minutes long and made up of a few longer shots so I think that I am going to have to shoot a few more shots to act as fillers so that I can shorten the longer shots so that it won't be boring or laborious to anybody. Also, I need to have a play around with colour effects on Premiere Pro to see if I can make it look any more realistic.

Ideas for film poster

Because I had finished my rough cut and I had an hour of lesson to fill, I thought that I could create some film posters on Photoshop. Below are my ideas.

Here is the first idea that I had. I thought it was bold and simplistic like my film and also my production companies. Originally, I had the film title in a bigger font but my neighbouring peer, Bill, suggested using a smaller font. I preferred this look as it creates a lot of empty space around the title and because of the contrasting black and white (and the fact that the title is the only thing on the page) you are instinctively drawn to it. Myself and Bill also thought that only having the film title on the poster created intrigue and questions in the viewer that made them want to find out more about the film.

On the right is my second idea. I thought that because the title was going to be the only thing on the page, that it should be bold and interesting. So, I duplicated the white title and changed the colour to a light and strange shade of green. I then layered it over the top of the white title, slightly off centre, so that it creates an image that looks 3D.

 

Left is my third idea. This time, I simply changed the white text to black so that the green text appears as if it has breaks in it, almost reflecting the personality of my protagonist.

The fourth idea is on the right. This idea was thought of by Bill and I think that the use of a purpley-pink looks very effective.

 

Left is my fifth idea. For this idea, I used white text and added a green glow around it which illuminates the title and, I think, makes it stand out from the page even more. Also, the illumination could be a reference to the searchlights that the viewer sees in the film opening.

Editing Stage 3

When editing, I thought that I should have a second ident at the beginning of my film due to the fact that a lot of films are not just produced or distributed by one company. Therefore, I created an indent for a distribution company: One Touch Entertainment. I sketched out a few ideas about what I thought the ident could look like and eventually i decided on the idea of having a simple handprint underneath the title of the film company. Below is a picture of the ident and the ident video.

Overall, editing is going well and I will have something to showcase to my class tomorrow so I can get feedback on what I have done so far. At the moment, I'm a little concerned about the music as I am not sure that it works very well with the film but hopefully my classmates will tell me their opinions about it tomorrow. Also, I think that I need to make the transition from one piece of music to the other smoother  and less obvious.

After the disaster of the though of having to convert every clip of footage, I got it all converted and have re-edited it all together. There are some shots that I think are too long but I need to meet the two minute mark for my film. I think that I will have to film some extra shots to act as fillers so that the audience are not watching one shot for too long.

Editing Stage 2

Disaster has struck and I am having to re-edit my entire film opening. Thanks to someone who used the school camera previous to myself, the settings were not on their default settings and so the footage was in full HD. This doesn't sound like a problem but because my titles are in normal HD (720p) and full HD is too big for a computer screen, I am having to convert all of my footage into 720p individually and re-edit them together. I have a lot of work to do and only a week to do it. It's an understatement to say that I'm a little stressed out right now...

Also, my teacher told me today that we are not allowed to have copyrighted music so my plans to have Cirque du Soleil's 'Battlefield' as the song for my titles may not happen. I will have to look around to try and find alternatives that are hopefully as good as I originally wanted.

Editing Conventions

Continuity editing – events unfold in chronological order (e.g. V for Vendetta)
Cross cutting – where two different scenes are shown one after the other so the audience believe that the scenes are occurring at the same time (e.g. V for Vendetta)
Eye line match – when a frame shows what the subject is looking at (e.g. V for Vendetta)
CONTINUITY EDITING IN 'V FOR VENDETTA'
Flashback – an event that has already occurred in relation to the film (e.g. The Hangover)

Flash-forward – an event that will happen in the future in relation to the film (e.g. Amores Perros)
'AMORES PERROS' OPENING SCENE - FLASHFORWARD
Montage – shots combined to show the passing of time (e.g. Rocky)

Fast paced – lots of small shots cut together to create action, suspense and tension (e.g. Die Hard)

Slow paced – long shots, usually used for dialogues (e.g. Snatch)

Editing

Editing is well underway at the moment and with only a week left until my deadline, I'm going to have to use a few of my frees to add in my final touches. I still need to add the voice over for Lia and the soft music for Lia's footage and generally tighten up the footage.

This is a screenshot of Premiere while i've been editing. You can see that I've cut down a lot of my footage and I have my titles in place too. I was very relived when I got them finished as it took me a while to get them done.

Below you can see a screenshot from my titles. I thought that adding newspaper articles behind the titles would make the credits a bit more interesting and give information about what the film is about. With each credit comes another newspaper article and this, coupled with the dramatic music should hopefully account for some interesting titles.

To-do

- Record Lia's voice over
- Record soft guitar piece for Lia's scenes
- Experiment with lighting effects and other filters on Premiere and After Effects to create the best image for my film
- Additional ident
- Blog progress of editing
- Blog about editing conventions