Extra Sound

In todays lesson we realised that each of our shots has their own quality of noise and when watching it through it makes it seem un even because the quality and level of background noise keeps changing throughout and is still slightly noticeable despite the music over the top, so we wanted to get some sort of background noise that could be played quite quietly and would act as a sound bridge and maintain a certain level of quality throughout the title sequence. I went up to the music tech room to look at some of the effects and sounds they had on the computers up there and found an ambient sound of a tape recorder and then looped it a couple times and exported it to my memory stick. We also wanted to have a sound play over our production company logo so that it looked a little bit more professional and more like actual films, so while i was in the music tech room i found a sound which would be perfect to use for that as it had the right sound to it.

In this time, Fred and Nicole had been sorting out the shot of the alarm clock because it had a hissing sound in the background which we didn't want so they were cutting out all the sound apart from when the alarm goes off and the character turns it off as we needed those sounds. After, we uploaded the production sound in and faded it out in the right place, we then also uploaded the background noise of the tape recorder and looped it over and over so it played through the whole thing to add to mystery and more tension, we also overlapped them a little each time we looped it so that it flowed well and constantly played and then finally put the volume down quite alot so that it wasn't obvious.

Editing Music

Today i went in on one of my free lessons and started to edit the music we had chosen, which was about 20 seconds short of the length of our opening sequence. To make it longer i split it up a couple of sections when the music drones and copied it a couple of times, i split it when the music drones because it's not as noticeable when part of a drone is repeated. I did this in a couple of points throughout the track until the music was at the length we needed and was timed right so that when the music was rapidly increasing in tension the video was as well. One problem was that in some parts that had been copied there was a little jump as it went from one bit to the next, so i looked at the audio effects and found one called constant power and put it over each of the joins of bits that had been copied, and this then made it flow through the music much better and it's not as easy to hear that the music had been cut and copied.

In this time i also created another series of quick fire shots, but this time they were literally split second clips put together and put at the end of the quick fire shots, i put it here because our opening sequence increases in tension as it goes on, so this is like the final big burst of tension before it stops with the music and then cuts to 'directed by' and then the shot of the character opening the door.

Titles - 3rd and 5th February

We continued adding in our titles in these lessons and made sure they were all on screen for a long enough time to read and faded them in and out at the right times. We put some titles on top of some of the shots and then also in between shots on a plain black background. We also changed the font of our titles from 'viva std' to 'courier new' and the colour to white because it looked better being simple and the colour white is a continuous thing in our opening sequence because of it's associations with mentality and hospitals. We took the glow effect we had on the writing as well so that it didn't look as tacky. Finally we put in the new music we found before and then deleted some of the audio on the shots like the door opening because we didn't need them there, however we did keep some like the sound of the footsteps in the snow and the toast being buttered because they sounded good and were emphasised because there were no other sounds apart from the instrumental piece of music.

Titles and Music - 1st February

In this lesson we put the music we had found onto the video and realised that the lyrics and vocals would attract too much attention from the rest of the titles so we needed an instrumental piece that was preferably quite classical. So we looked on the creative commons website again and found a piece that fitted well because the music increased in tension like our footage did, the music was also quite creepy and strange which made it fit in even more. The only problem with the music was that the original file was only 58 seconds long and our opening sequence needed to be about 2minutes, so we're going to find the section before the music gets increasingly louder and increases tension and copy it a couple of times so that when it starts to build lots of tension it will playing when the series of quick fire shots come on screen and last until the end. We also continued with adding in our titles in the right order and decided to make the titles on the normal daily routine shots black and the weird shots titles red because black is a calmer ordinary colour where as red is associated with anger and blood.

Editing and Start of Titles - 29th January

Today we recaptured our shot of the alarm being turned off because last time we had cut off part of it and then we uploaded our production logo that Fred designed and put some writing on it that said ' Ring Eclipse ' productions in a nice font that stood out, we put this at the start of our all our footage because thats the order it would usually go. After making a few minor changes to some clips like trimming them a bit more, we were ready to move on to putting the actual titles in so we looked back at our earlier research on the order of opening titles so that we knew where to start. We started to experiment with how to make titles and change things like the fonts, colours, tracking, aspect, positions and other things. We tested out these things so that we could see what looked good where and what looks good with the genre and theme of our film, we also set points on the titles so that they would fade in and out where we wanted.

Editing - 25th and 27th

Last lesson we started looking at some of the effects we could use and tested some on our shots like 'ghosting' for example. This was one that we really like because it makes it look really weird and creepy by giving it a shadow of the image thats delayed to the actual action. This looked especially good on the shot of the character rocking back and forth and struggling in a straight jacket because the movement itself is quite disturbing and is even more so with the ghosting effect on it. We also sped this shot up to make it look even more deranged and disorientated and it looked really good so we kept it. Finally we also logged our newest footage and then captured what we wanted and trimmed them up so that they could be re-arranged into a rough order.

Today we decided to sort out our quick fire shots so we copied a couple of shots and took only a second or two from each so that we would have a series of weird images cut in one after another quite quickly because it creates a big build up of tension. These quick fire shots represent all the madness and psycho parts of his life/memory come back and from then making his life no longer normal anymore. 'Se7en' is again a good example of our idea for quick fire shots because it had quite a few shots flash up on screen that aren't the nicest of images and are quickly one after another. However we've got a longer line of them so that the tension is all built up at once.

Editing - 22nd January

In todays lesson we sorted out all of the shots we had already captured because we wanted to start getting a decent order of what things should be. We matched up a few of our shots so that one represents his normal sane life and then the next shot will be similar except it will be more deranged and creepy looking to symbolise his insanity coming back and breaking through. For example when we flick between the character simply doing up his shirt and then him then struggling in a straight jacket. We also have a shot of him tying up his shoe laces followed by fast paced footsteps going back and forth, it's the same part of the body with a normal side and an insane side. At the end of this lesson we decided that our last shots that needed to be filmed would preferably be shot in a house because they're all quite homely shots like turning off an alarm from sleep, buttering toast, putting on a tie and suit jacket and finally the end shot of the character walking and opening his front door with bright white light coming though to symbolise his new normal life because the colour of white is usually associated with hospitals and mentality but it can also be associate with pure and new which will work well with our opening sequence ideas.

Filming - 20th January

Last lesson we carried on with our filming and decided to film the shot of the rope tied in a hangman's noose hanging from somewhere. We thought this shot would be effective outside because it was quite gloomy outside and it then meant we could the rugby posts to hang it from. We tried a few different angles like a close up of the knot whilst someone was pulling down on the end to make it look like someone was hanging from it, but we found that a mid shot of the rope swinging back and forth, with a slight tilt up like we were looking up at it, was the most effective. We also tried a few indoor shots with the rope and got a good shot that was at an angle and a close up of the knot and part of the loop. It was good because of the shadow that was created on the wall behind it as it gently swayed which will add to the mysterious elements of our titles. Another shot we did was of a really tidy desk which we needed to show one of the characters weird habits which was an OCD for organising things in a certain way, so we set up a desk with some books, pencils, newspapers, folders etc all organised in their own little way. We did a couple of shots of this as well including a still shot of the whole desk and a close up which panned across the whole desk. When picking up books to put in order we found one titled 'Decline and Fall' which even though it was about something completely different we thought that the title would make another good hint at the characters personality and mind, so we neatly put this book facing up so that the title was clear when we filmed the shot.

Today we filmed a close up of the characters tying his shoes up for another part of the characters ordinary routine, although when filming it we found that it looked good when there was a slight emphasis on the pulling of the laces because it's like the insanity and anger is trying to break through his normal exterior. We then logged this and our previous shots so that we could capture them and then continue focusing on the rest of the filming.

Filming - 15th January

In this lesson we went and filmed a close up of a hand putting toothpaste on a toothbrush because this is one of our sane, normal shots of a basic daily routine. We shot a couple of different angles like a point of view shot to see what we thought would look best but at the moment we think that the high angle shot looks better. We also managed to film a shot of the characters torso buttoning up a plain white shirt along with a shot of the same section of his body but this time in a straight jacket moving frantically and struggled in it. We first shot it in the same place as the normal shirt one but realised that it didn't look right and the straight jacket shot needed to be in a different place, so we filmed it through a glass panel on a door with the character behind it just to see what it was like, and we thought it looked really good because it made the character look more trapped and distressed almost like an animal in a cage.