EVALUATION - Question 1

EVALUATION - Question 2

EVALUATION - Question 3

EVALUATION - Question 4

As you can see here is a general example of our dil audience. A women who is 28 and is interested in psychological thrillers such as Flightplan and Inception.

EVALUATION - Question 5

As you can see we had received positive feedback from a person in our target audience , thus showing that we achieved the goal of suiting the movie to this specific target audience.

EVALUATION - Question 6

EVALUATION - Question 7

EDITING - Final titles/title order

EDITING - Final Stages of Editing

During the final stages of editing, the pressure was mounting as we reached our deadline. We had various faults we had to fix with our film.

The length of each title went by too quick for the viewer to read so we edited the length of the cross fade and tested it to see if it was readable in the specific timeframe.

We also had to go back and change the placement of the titles to make sure they fit in the viewing frame:

Another thing we did was remove some titles. This is because they didn't all fit on the same shot and we wanted it to look neat. Taking 2 or 3 off ensured everything ran smoothly in sync.

EDITING - Changing Titles

Our original titles during post-production have been changed from the previous text-font we placed in our draft of the the film after having received feedback, as it was found to be too distracting and removed focus from our shots.

Here is a visual display showing the difference between our previous and current text-font:

Before

After

This meant using Final Cut Pro's text options. We were able to keep the shadows which is what we really liked in the first place

Creating the titles on final cut pro

EDITING - Title order

We have decided to follow a common order for titles for our thriller opening. It is as follows: 

1. Distrubtor ident
2. Production company ident
3. Distributor company
4. Production company
5. Film name
6. Actor 1
7. Actor 2
8. Actor 3
9. Actor 4
10. Actor 5
11. Music supervisor and music by
12. Costume designer
13. Production designer
14. Editor
15. Executive producers and producers
16. Written by
17. Director

The reasoning behind this order:
Firstly, we chose to make the film name appear before the actors because there are no big stars in our thriller. The director is shown last because they are the ones that probably have the most impact on a film. The distributor and production company have the most impact on a films success hence why they are shown first. Music supervisor & music by and executive producers & producers will be combined onto the same shot as they are similar.

EDITING - Titles; text colour

On 'Live Type' as we used the effect 'frigid' we had limited choice on the colour of the text. It automatically uses the colour blue and we are not very sure about this as we believe black on white/white on black would have appeared more professional. This means we had a dilemma as if we wanted this colour composition we would have to use a different effect which we didn't want to do as we were very happy with 'frigid'. Therefore, I researched some more psychological thrillers and found that 'Memento' uses a narrative opening with blue coloured titles. 

 

This settles the decision more as 'Momento' was a great success and there were no complaints on the choice of text colour used in the titles. If anything, it just makes them stand out and adds something to the dull lighting in the shots.

EDITING - Creating and adding Titles

To create our titles we used a programme called 'Live Type'. This is because there is a much winder range of fonts and effects that you can choose from compared to Final Cut Pro's text options. The first step was generating the titles. We chose a specific font, size and effect to personalise the titles for our thriller opening. We used an effect called frigid which causes the writing to shake erratically as this relates to the film contents in terms of the mother being very distressed etc. We chose the specific 'report' font because it is not too simple and not too complicated. Also it can be read easily. The size is not very large but is large enough to be seen from afar. We purposely didn't make it too big because we want them in the corner of the screen so they don't get in the way of viewing. We also chose how long we wanted each of the titles to be shown for. We decided for them to last for nearly as long as the shot they appear on lasts for. The next step was importing them onto Final Cut Pro and dealing with the placement of them on the screen. We tried our best to space them out so it was not just title after title.

PLANNING - Another name idea

We are still undecided on the name of our thriller. 'Manquant' is another option meaning 'Missing' in French. We think this is short, snappy and interesting as it is a foreign language making it mysterious. Those who know French will understand it and those who don't won't

EDITING - What's next (titles research)

Titles! We have just under a week to add some titles onto our opening sequence. We are settled on using a narrative opening however font, colour, sizing and placement is undecided. We are going to look into some pyschological/crime thriller openings to see what kind of titles they use...

This is a photo taken from the opening sequence of the psychological thriller seven. It too uses a narrative opening where the titles appear over the screen although the structure of the opening is different to ours. The writing is simple but appears messy/unorganised which gives it a very scattered appearence. This relates to the subgenre as psychological thrillers are confusing and not straight forward. We will consider this type of appearence for our own titles.

EDITING - The team at work

 

THRILLER OPENING - Rough Cut (post feedback)

 

This is the rough cut of our thriller opening after making some suggested changes. It's not completed and needs a bit more work in terms of visual editing. As seen there are no titles yet.

THRILLER OPENING - Initial feedback

Our group showed Donna what we had done so far and she gave some feedback in order for us to improve our thriller opening. This included:

• Removing the shot of the door knocking as it was out of focus, dark and unclear
• Inter-cutting some shots which appeared to be too long for example-->
• Shortening the first and last shot of the swing. They both go on for too long and the approx 10 second duration isn't needed. 4 seconds would be more effective
• Removing the directional blur from the POV shots. Don feels that the panning parts are strong enough without adding an effect which blurs the viewing
• Removing the shot of the mothers POV of falling and also the wide shot of her rocking back and forth on the floor. Neither of them are needed to determine what is going on in the opening
• Taking out the shots of the counseller talking and replacing them with the footage we got where she is just intesively looking at the mother. The fact that the counseller is talking but we cannot hear what she is saying may be frustrating for the audience. Don said that the counsellers authority is obvious due to the way she appears therefore speech is not crucial

After discussing what would make our film stronger we are going to make these changes and upload the product as the rough cut

create an animated gif

EDITING - Creating and adding the sountrack

Creating the soundtrack on soundtrack pro

Our soundtrack was created on soundtrack pro. We searched the categories which contained the most melancholic sounding pieces as we feel this would be very gripping for the audience combined with the imagery in our opening. We also added on the faint sound of children talking. The particular one we chose sounds like a park eenvironment and the voices aren't too loud so they don't drown out the rest of the attributes of our thriller opening. This music reflects the mothers mind as the music is very sad and the voices are heard but aren't recognisable/whats said isn't understood. This highlights the fact that the mother is extremely upset, confused and is in her own world.

Importing the sound onto final cut pro

EDITING - Constructing the timeline and adding effects

Putting the clips in order

 

Adding 'directional blur'

We put a lot of time into experimenting with all the different effects on final cut pro. In this particular part of the opening where the camera is panning around the park imitating the mothers point of view, we went for a blur effect to highlight her disorientation. The one we thought looked best was directional blur.

Adjusting the speed of a clip

Adding a white flash before the motion goes backwards