Evaluation Question 7

Looking back at the preliminary task, what do you feel you have learned in the progression from it to the product?

Quality of shot

After looking at the preliminary task, it is clear the film sequence that we have created shows major progression from when we first began the process. In terms of shot, our sequence is much more complex in terms of the camera shots and movement that we used in the prelim task. In this task, the camera was always still besides in one scene where the camera was held in a POV fashion and this was not steady at all. As shown from the final sequence, we have massively improved this with the use of much more POV which we ensured was constantly steady for our effect as well as camera pans to establish the setting of the scenes. 

Still camera

Pan camera

Quality of lighting

In comparison to our preliminary task, we have varied our choice of lighting and used it to our advantage and effect whilst taking into account that we were creating a sequence of the horror genre. Due to our lack of professional equipment, we often had to rely on natural lighting particularly for outdoor scenes so we tried to go out and film on gloomier days to suit this idea of horror and darkness. In the house scenes, we were able to close doors and curtains to block out light as we were not able to manipulate the classroom in the same way at school. In the outdoor scenes we used the filters on final cut to make the scenes seem much darker and so this was very useful. An example of filter that we used in this situation was ‘combat’.

No filter

Combat filter

Quality of sound

In terms of sound, there has clearly been a massive improvement from our preliminary task to our finished title sequence. In the prelim task, our diegetic sound in particular speech was poor as we were not clear enough ourselves but also due to the sound coming from other areas around the school e.g. teachers talking and doors opening and closing. In our final sequence, we ensured that the camera was close enough to pick up speech and we avoided any background noise that could have been about but shutting doors or re-shooting scenes. This helped us in terms of clarity and therefore would benefit the audience much more. The ability that we had to edit sound of final cut pro was also very useful as we were able to turn up and turn down certain sounds that we did or didn't need. It also allowed us to add in non-diegetic sound in terms of music for the benefit of the audience to create tension however, we could also add some sound that was classed as diegetic such as wind in order to make the sequence seem much more realistic. 

Continuity

On the whole, our continuity was very good however, there were a few problems which we dealt with efficiently. One of our characters was not able to film on a certain day so I filled in as the character but this was easy enough to do as the face of the character was covered anyway due to the large cape which represented the antagonist. All other areas of costume were well dealt with and the sequence flowed well for the audience to understand as we ordered the footage accordingly to help the audience follow and understand it.

Preliminary Task

The preliminary task was rather difficult as we had no real experience of filming when we did it and so we had to think on our feet to get it right and get a feel for the process. The hardest element of this was to get all shots correct and for it to flow when you watch it back. We had to re-film some elements as when we watched it back, one small movement was missing but we acknowledged that this made a big difference. The match on action was not clear as I walked through the door and it was shown at different angles so this needed sorting. This was easy enough to sort out however with a bit more filming and we took this on board when going into the filming for our final title sequence.

Overall impression

On the whole I am very pleased with our finished title sequence as I believe it looks very professional and we have used all the features and resources available to us to make it the best it could be. I am very happy with the raw footage that we have picked up as it helps to tell a short story within the sequence. When put together with filters on Final Cut, the scenes look very impressive and through the use of costumes we have identified a clear antagonist and protagonist which creates binary opposition for the audiences when consuming the text. In the process we can always find things to improve on and I’d say that worst elements at this stage would be the titles and maybe the sound. These were the last features that we looked at and so maybe we were a little rushed however, we found it difficult to make the titles particularly clear and to cut them into certain scenes for the correct time that we needed. It was also hard to incorporate all of the sound that we had prepared. We had to overlap this in some areas and so it is not quite professional however we did the best that we could using the fade in and fade out element on final cut pro for our sound.

Evaluation Question 6

Evaluation Question 5

Evaluation Question 4

Evaluation Question 3

Evaluation Question 2

Evaluation question 1

Final Title Sequence- Third Time Around

Editing our footage 10 (Extra session)

This was our final session of editing and it came rather late as I had been on a trip for the past week. We all got together yesterday after school to finally get the sequence finished. I thought that it would be a good idea to watch our sequence through first so that we knew what we could improve and touch up on during this session. The main theme of the session was inserting transitions to improve the professionalism and flow of our piece as it was rather jumpy before this. The main two transitions that I chose were 'cross dissolve and fade to colour' which both fitted in very well to our piece.

We then noticed that some of the shots were not as dark as we would have liked them to be and so we played around on Final Cut to solve this problem. After finding this area, we used the exposure method to make these shots darker and therefore more appropriate for a horror film as this is what we are creating. Beth lowered the exposure to suit it for our needs as this would make the audience feel a little more tense during the sequence in the part where the antagonist is walking up the stairs with the POV shot.

To finish off the sequence, I adjusted the positioning of some of the textual titles so that they were clearly visible for the audience to see as they watch it. This was not outstandingly necessary however these little changes can just make a difference for the audience and so this polished off the seqeuence and made it ready to upload to YouTube, The sequence will be available to see in my next post. It is titled 'Third Time Around'.

Editing our footage 9 (Extra session)

This session took place after school on Wednesday where Beth and I came back in the absence of Eboni who had a dentist appointment. Our main focus at this point was just touching up our sequence, mainly in terms of sound. After watching the sequence back, we realised that we could include a little more diegetic sound with the help of the sample sounds that were already imported onto Final Cut Pro. Miss had suggested that we added in little sounds of door creeks and wind which was relatively easy as we knew the exact places that these would and so this was not a problem. We then needed a dramatic noise which would be played whenever the antagonist came into shot throughout the sequence. I scrolled through these sounds and managed to find one called 'Drone dark 02' and this was perfect as it increased both drama and tension when the dark figure showed up. I dragged this into each sequence where the character was visible and we agreed that this just added a discrete improvement to the sequence; all of which are very useful.

This would be the last piece of editing that I did myself however, due to Eboni's absence on the Wednesday, she said that she would make up her time and put it in the final touches to the sequence which would be a massive help.

Editing our footage 8

As we come to the final pieces of editing for the sequence, we added in the titles of the cast, production company, directors and all other contributions to the film. Eboni had researched that many popular horror films used the institution 'Warner Bros' so we decided that we should feature this in the titles. I then knew that this would not look professional if it was just randomly placed in this scene so I suggested that it was clearly place underneath the photos here with a bold black font which we identified as being called 'Designer thin'. This would make it clearly visible for the audience to see without it being too outstanding. It also occurred that this would need a transition to enter the scene and so we played around and came to an agreement on one. We decided upon the fade in and fade out transition as this would effectively go alongside the actual clip which was also going to fade out and when we watched this back, it looked perfectly professional.

               

As we carried on with the titles, I came across a slight problem with the colour and positioning in a certain scene. We had planned to add titles to the part where we filmed Olivia's bottom half of her body as she skipped under the bridge as this would go with the consistency of scenes where text was added. I knew that we needed text in here but when I first positioned it, it wasn't particularly clear enough to see however, we left it as it was for the time being. We then watched it back with Miss and mutually agreed that it was not correct and so we discussed a re arrangement for the text. After playing around with the tools, we moved the text across to the right corner, as opposed to the left, and added a bold feature to the text which guaranteed us much more visibility and solved our problem.

   

          

Left side (Not so visible)

Right side (Much more visible)

Editing our footage 7

Beth today put in some diegetic sound of wind and the squeak of a door which we used from what was available on Final Cut pro. I then added in the non diegetic music of a piano to create tension when the figure is on screen and when we watched these parts back we were very happy with how it looked and sounded. I have now researched some existing films and what is contained within their title sequences. Here is the order that the titles usually come in:

1.    Name of the studio that is distributing the film.

2.    Name of the production company responsible for making the film. If an investor financed a substantial portion of the movie, they will usually be credited alongside the production company with “In Association with.”

3.    A (Producer’s Name) Production.

4.    A Film by (Director’s Name).

5.    Starring (this is optional or can be paired with the first cast member’s name), followed by the names of all principal actors.

6.    Film title.

7.    Featured cast members. A card that states “Featuring” used to be fairly commonplace but now appears to be falling out of fashion; in some cases, to speed up a title sequence, featured players are held off for the end crawl.

8.    Casting by.

9.    Music, composer, or original score.

10.    Production designer.

In the remainder of this lesson, I began to add in some text before we properly get started with it tomorrow. With help from Miss we went onto 'Dafont' and picked a relevant font that was similar to the one that Beth had created herself. She used publisher to convert the font from black writing with a white background to white writing with a black background as this was more suited to the fade transition at the end of the sequence. Whilst Beth was doing this I began to add text into the main body of the sequence. Myself and Eboni decided on the positioning of the text and put it in suitably. Together we looked through the available transitions and used specific parts of Final Cut to edit the colour and size of the text.

Feedback for sequence/ Editing our footage 6

In today's lesson, my group was given this sheet of feedback from Miss. She had looked at a draft of our sequence in the last lesson that we had before half term and come up with some constructive feedback which we are going to use in order for piece to achieve the best mark possible. Here is the list that we were given:

Firstly, we looked at the pace on the POV shot going up the stairs at it occurred to us that it did need speeding up and so we used the 'fast forward' effect to speed this along so the audience are not made to wait during this point in the sequence. We also looked at the tracking shot and we are still in debate as to whether we will be able to film more to make this clearer and more effective by shooting a POV shot from under the bed or to cut out this clip. I have restructured the main body of the sequence along with Beth and Eboni to create this enigma and we have made the swing scene more of a flash up to extend this idea. 

Re-order of sequence

As I said previously, we were recommended to edit the order of our sequence so that we could increase the tension of the audience whilst they watch it. The piece was structured very methodically and we had not really thought about how to make it effective in a certain order so we took on the advice and improved it. As the POV shot went up the stairs we decided to include the shots of Olivia being restless and little shots of the dream immediately after so that it was more of a progressive journey to her room for the antagonist. This meant that we had to jump to different scenes but we did not mind this as we fully understood that it would be much more effective in the long run. It took a while to re order it all and so we took turns in doing so. Beth began by re arrange the raw order by splitting up the POV shot to the bedroom. Eboni then followed this up with little bits of Olivia in her bed being agitated so that the audience would be aware that she is having this dream. I then re ordered the bits of the dream within this so it is clear of the events that she is experiencing. After making this re-arrangement we were much happier with our piece.

Editing our footage 5

This was the last editing lesson before the half term and we had to ensure that we had created a completed draft sequence. We had completed the main of our sequence and so we used this session to edit fine details that would make a difference when watching it back. Before we started I showed the piece to Miss and as we watched it back I realised that it was very slow and therefore did not attract attention very well and so our first job was to solve this problem. I used the 'blade and arrow' technique to shorten the scenes so that they were of a sufficient length whilst preventing them from being too long. We also noticed that before the music was to be introduced, there was a lot of ambient sound that the camera had picked up during filming. In order to amend this, Beth selected the areas that needed lower volume and decreased the sound using the arrow bar. After this, I was able to import the music that I had downloaded onto my memory stick and place it into the sequence. It seemed to fit in very well and it suited our piece which I was very happy with.

 

Finally in this session, our work was again watched back by Miss and she recommended that we changed the order of the sequence so that it was easier to understand for the audience. I will go into more detail about this in my next post.

Downloading sound

From this extra session today, I became aware that I needed some more sound to download to fill in some scenes for our sequence. I thought that we should use the 'Hush little baby' theme tune during the dream as this syncs very nicely and adds a rather sinister effect with the theme of children. After I had put this in however, the sound was rather disjointed and so I have now downloaded some more music that we can add in tomorrow. During my initial research into horror movies, I noted the effect of sound and picked up on the type of instruments that were used in certain situations. In tense moments the use of a piano seemed very effective and so I searched for a piece like this on YouTube and was very successful with what I found. I converted this using 'YouTube converter' and put it onto my memory stick so it is ready for use in tomorrows lesson whilst ensuring that there would be no copyright issues and the description confirmed this to me. In case there were any problems with this piece or if we needed some more music to fill scenes I downloaded a second piece which uses the same instrument of a piano in order to still create the tension within the audience. Again I put it into 'YouTube converter' and it is now ready for use tomorrow.

Editing our footage 4 (extra session)

I knew that 1 final session for editing would not be enough to have an adequate piece ready as a draft before the half term and so I took it into my own hands to ask for some extra time to edit. Miss offered Thursday lunchtime and so myself and Beth went back to the room at this point to get some extra editing done. The room however was in use at lunch time so I suggested going back after school on the same day which was fine. At 3.05 I went back to Miss' room with Eboni this time as Beth could not attend.

       

We got to work straight away and checked up on the work that we had done previously. I had downloaded some sound the night before to add into the footage and so I imported this onto the footage and Eboni decided where it would fit best. We mutually decided that it would sound good during the 'dream' part of the sequence as this would coincide well with a rather sinister nursery rhyme. The music is also rather slow in tempo which is helpful is it creates drama and is very intriguing which will make the audience want to confirm their thoughts by watching the film.

Next in this session, we played around with the effects on Final cut pro as these are very influential in horror films. Just like the music during the dream, we used the same effect for all of these scenes and this was called 'Cold steel'. I chose this and Eboni agreed that we should use this as it was very dreamlike and it didn't use any particular natural colours which would allow an audience to realise that this was part of the dream. For all of the other scenes during the footage we used the 'combat' effect which we had liked from very early on. It looked very professional and we both thought that it looked very similar to those used in horror sequences that already exist.

Extra editing

We currently have one lesson of editing left before our deadline whereby we must have a full sequence drafted and ready. I do not believe that we will be able to meet this deadline with just this one lesson so today I asked Miss if it was okay to come in at lunch-time tomorrow to get a little more done so that we are ready for the deadline after Friday's lesson. We could possibly finish it all in Friday's lesson but to be on the safe side, we will come back tomorrow and get more done so that we can meet the deadline. In this extra editing tomorrow, I believe that we need to ensure the sequence is all in order and that we have cropped the scenes and clips effectively. After this I will add in the sound that I have saved on my memory stick and we will see how well it fits in and if any more of it is needed. We could also start to add some visual text throughout the sequence to inform the audience who is in the film, who has directed it and who has produced it etc. Another aspect that we can add in if we have time is a little animation or theme at the beginning to instantly show the audience what the sequence is.

Sound Progress

I am in control of the sound for our title sequence and I have made some progress and got some sound to put with the footage. After being granted permission to use the link from YouTube 'Hush little baby' soundtrack I used YouTube converter to download it onto my laptop and I then transferred it to my memory stick so that we could use it in our sequence. I have not yet put it onto the sequence as we have not had an editing lesson since I downloaded it however I will be sure to do it next lesson. I have downloaded this piece but I am still looking out for other sounds that would be relevant to our horror film sequence. These sounds would be very helpful along with the imported sounds from the Macs which I will also be inclined to use.

                            

Editing our footage 3

Today was our second lesson of editing and this time we had much more footage to work with and so our sequence is coming on very well. We put the footage onto the mac and began to edit with Eboni taking over for the first third of the lesson. She put all of the clips in order of use whilst Beth and I shared ideas and instructed her to crop little different pieces of sections which she did. When Beth took over we ensured that all of the shots were in order and added some filters to the footage that we had. I came across a filter called 'combat' and I believed that this would work very well on the majority of our shots as it created a sinister effect which suits our genre of horror very well. I then took over the editing and just checked up on the order of the shots and whether they had been cropped correctly. After this I finished off the filtering of all of the footage and this left us ready and prepared for our next lesson of editing.

Filming day 3

This session was much more successful and it allowed us to get all the required footage that we needed for the whole sequence. We all woke early on Sunday morning to meet up and film therefore we managed to visit 3 different locations to get it all finished.

With no time limit, we were able to go back to previous locations to get more footage. Here I lay down to film a long angle shot on an abandoned railway. The location and angle made it look very imposing.I thought that this piece of footage would look very effective with a filter or effect on it so we went ahead and got the relevant footage ready to edit at school.          

Beth then filmed the alternate angle of the scene where the antagonist watches the girl as she skips up the path below. I directed here as I had planned out the ideas previously as I knew the area well and the footage that we could get from it. We chose an over the shoulder shot to watch the scene from the point of view of the villain however we had a slight problem whilst doing this. There was no leverage to be in a comfortable position to get the footage from high up so Beth just had to hope that it looked good. In the end it wasn't too bad but just to make sure, I took over filming as I am taller than Beth and therefore I could try to get a steadier shot.


We then went on to our next location which was Stoney Bridge in Timperley as we had decided that we would use the park to film a scene where the antagonist gets closer to the protagonist without her knowing.

Filming preparation

The weather has mainly cleared up today and we are very much prepared and ready to get up early and film tomorrow. Conditions are looking very good which is very helpful as some of the shots that we will film tomorrow have already been attempted however the lighting was not too good at this time. It is bright and clear with no more snow to come which is very encouraging and useful for our filming schedule.

The plan is to:

1: Meet at railway bridge at 11.00
2. Get all filming done there
3. Travel together to the next location (Stoney Bridge)
4. Film all that is needed here
5. Travel together to final location (Beth's Nana's)
6. Finish filming and re-shooting certain shots from last time
7. Finish

If we stick to this plan then we will have filmed very efficiently. By this time tomorrow, we will have all of our footage ready to edit at school next week however, due to our setbacks we may have to do some extra editing outside of lessons to get it finished for half term.

Editing our footage 2

For this session of editing we still didn't have too much footage however, we improvised whilst making do with the footage that we did have. Eboni had been to Dunham to get some footage of the house that we would use to establish the setting for this scene in the sequence. We used a house of this size to make it look very imposing when the camera moves towards it. Perfect for a horror film once we had edited it and used the combat filter effect.

We then noticed however that we had a slight problem. The footage still had black lines above and below it which gave it a rather cinematic look but we were not sure if we wanted to use this. I decided against it as we want the audience to see the full film and so we found the 'Ken Burns' effect of editing which took out the black areas and also added in some movement whereby we could zoom in and out of the house. After having no more footage to edit at this point we left it and began to come up with ideas for what we would soon film and how we were going to edit it before the lesson finished.

Character profiles

We decided that for only a small sequence, we would only need 2 characters to create an accurate portrayal of the film that we had come up with. Eboni decided that her sister would be perfect to represent the protagonist of our film as our first idea was that the theme would be a 'creepy kid' film. I then decided that my friend Max would be appropriate to represent the antagonist in the film and it was also very beneficial that he could help us out with filming on occasions whenever we needed him.

               Role: Protagonist

               Real name: Olivia
               Character name: Eleanor
               Age: 13
               Occupation: School girl
               Ethnicity: White British






                Role: Antagonist
                                                         
                Real name: Max Shaw
                Character name: Unnamed
                Age: 100+
                Occupation: Villain
                Ethnicity: White British
             

Weather problems

Over the past couple of days, we have experience lots of snow and this has interrupted our filming schedule. We had planned to film on Thursday however, it was very difficult for us all to get to our locations due to this weather and so we had to cancel our plans. I did think that the snow could add an interesting effect to our sequence but we knew we still had to be safe in the way that we went about it. We have rescheduled to film on the Sunday when hopefully, the ground will be mostly clear but we are hoping for a little snow in our higher locations to still be present. This will enhance the aesthetics of our footage as the villain will stand out very will on the white snow and would be a perfect ending to the sequence.

Filming day 2

This day of filming was very rushed. Due to extra revision lessons after school, not all members could attend to film straight away which was a problem as we needed to film before it went dark. We worked with what we had and we all got together to film despite Beth. I filmed a lot of the shots as I knew the location very well however we did face problems with the dark as when we watched some of the footage back, we could not make out much of the action. The darkness added a rather sinister element to the footage which made some of it very good but in other places we could not see so we realised that it would not be consistent. 

In order to counter this problem, Eboni suggested using car headlights which gave us some extra artificial lighting and looked very good from some angles. Again however from others we could not make out the antagonist which would be a key a focus when the sequence would be watched through.

We used improvisation however we came to the decision that we would rearrange this session for filming to another date so that the lighting would be much better for us and we agreed on Sunday morning which was much more appropriate.