Foundation Portfolio: Using the micro-elements of mise-en-scène, cinematography, sound and camera angles to create a film opening in a genre of your choice.
At the beginning of the course, before starting our main film openings, we had to make a 30 second clip of a character opening a door, sitting down, having a conversation and then leaving. We were given specific things
to include in our task: an example of match on action, the 180 degree rule and shot reverse shot.
Della and I also used some of the editing techniques that we were thinking of using in our film, mainly overlaying shots and the cross fade transition. Doing our preliminary task allowed us to get used to the editing software, and also working with a camera.
We finished our 3rd edit of the film opening, it is very similar to the 2nd, except that we altered the vision scene to look like the above image. We layered the two shots together because Della and I both felt that it looks more surreal and the audience will be able to recognise that it's a vision more easily.
We also altered the sequence in which the vision scene happens. We start with the extreame close up of Jay's eyes, then move to the vision, then back to Jay's eyes and finishing with the close up of Emily looking secretive. We feel that this ties the scene together nicely, and by placing the same shot of Jay's eyes either side of the vision it brings the audience "back to reality" and emphasizes the fact that the scene wasn't reality.
We have encountered one slight problem though; the colouring on the walking home scene and the stabbing scene looked different on final cut than on youtube, they are a lot darker and the colours don't look exactly right. To solve this, all we need to do is simply adjust the colour settings on both of these clips, which won't take long at all. Here is a still from the walking home scene:
We still want it to look dark and mysterious, however, this may be slightly too dark.
We added the above titles (the name's of the actors) to our film. We decided not to use the font animation tool LiveType for these because they are on during when the film plays and we both felt that to have animated and moving titles on whilst this is happening would detract from the action of the film.
The font that we chose is from font website http://www.dafont.com/, which is a free font download website that we used for our animated titles as well. The font we selected doesn't really belong to a particular genre, however, I personally feel that it has a sense of thrillier / horror film about it due to the typewritten styling of it.
Another thing we did was re-order our clips to the order I mentioned in the post about our first edit. I think this has been effective because it has made our film opening easier to understand and also gives it a sense of time sequencing.
Next edit we are working on the vision scene, (1.16 - 1.26), because we think by laying the shot of Emily's face over her running it will show the contrast between vision and reality. Also, we may edit the order in which the extreame close ups of Emily's face and Jay's eyes come on to make the scene flow better.
To make the transitions between our clips look less harsh Della and I chose to use the transitional tools on Final Cut to link clips together. We used 'Cross Fade' a lot because we felt it made the getting ready scenes more smooth, creating an atmosphere of relaxation.
However, to contrast the smooth editing predominantly used in the film, for the running scene at 1.46 in the second edit we chopped pieces out of the original clip to make it have a more stacato and jumpy beat. This dramatizes the clip and also fits well with the music.
As I said in the previous post, we have constructed our titles using animation programme 'Livetype'.
We have the following titles:
HMG Productions
A Helwig and Daniels Film
Emily Smith
Jay Khatri
Directed by Della Helwig and Becky Daniels
Foretold
All of these will be made on Livetype, except 'Emily Smith' and 'Jay Khatri' because we want them to fade in onto the black part of the final split screen. Emily's on the top and appearing first, Jay's second at the bottom. This is because it connotes that it is Emily's story and she is the main focus.
Last week, myself and Della finished our initial edit of our film. We are both execptionally pleased with the outcome of the shots and also our titles, which we created on 'Livetype', a programme for font animation, to add a dynamic effect to our title sequences. Below is a screenshot of our font and graphic title.
We managed to make the two very contrasting styles of music fit together and sound very dramatic, emphasing the action within the film. We achieved this by using the pen tool to merge the music together, making it less jolty to listen to.
We asked our teacher for feedback regarding our first edit and he seemed happy with it - however, he did mention that it was quite difficult to understand when the clips were happening. To fix this we have re-ordered our clips in the following order : dress scence, dinner scene, walking home, running, killing, final title. This will hopefully allow the audience to better understand the time frame we are working on.
