Soul Beneath Attempt 3

After filming all my cutaway shots and my missing shots, I assembled them together, edited them down and colour corrected the footage to make it look like it was in Lia's bedroom. I also put flares in the titles to try and break them up a bit so they are less monotonous and also reflect the flashing lights in the footage.

Here is Soul Beneath, take 3:

In the film opening, I think that the cutaway shots (news article headlines from 1969) give an indication of the journey that Lia will take but I'm not sure that they really match the rest of my footage.

Playing with the order of shots

Since the last blog post, I have been playing around with the order of my shots to see if I can create a more dynamic film opening. I tried moving the shot where 'Lia' is at the window looking out, to the start of the film opening so that the audience can gather a clearer picture of her character earlier on in the film but this meant that it didn't fade into the titles like it did before. I exported the video with the changed order of shots and showed both the original cut and the changed cut to a few people and it was unanimous that the original cut was better than the cut with the changed order of shots and so, I am going to add a few more shots into the original cut (such as cutaways and a shot of her actually getting to the window) in an effort to try and improve my film opening.

Below is the cut with the changed shot order.

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.

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.