Before recording our own sounds, we decided to create a list of the different sounds that we would need for our film, both diegetic and non-diegetic. Below you can see some of the sounds we thought was needed for our opening sequence:
Monthly Archives: January 2015
Synaesthetic Soundscape
When thinking about sound, we looked into Synaesthesia, this is thought to be when, for instance, you’re listening to something and you may see a colour or something else. With this in mind, we listened to the clip below an thought about what the sound meant to us. This was really important because we need to be able to reflect on our thrillers sound, it really changes the feeling of the film, so its important to get it right.
Below you can see a Wordle we created of words that came to mind whilst listening to the soundtrack.
Draft 2 – Titles
Below you see us begin to edit our titles in from using the programme After Effects. We imported them into Premiere Pro and began to place them onto black backgrounds. You can also see some of the editing changes we made to the rest of the footage from our feedback on draft one. Below you can view our second draft:
Titles Research
We looked into three different films of the thriller genre for knowledge of the conventions of titles in a thriller. We were also able to see the order of the jobs within the making of the film. With this knowledge we can give our titles accordingly in our own thriller. Below you can see our research:
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Se7en
Shutter Island
Effects and Titles
After looking at the different types of titles that might suit our film, we finally picked one that worked with those themes of espionage and surveillance. We chose to use something we thought quite similar to the Bourne films. These kind of titles are really straight forward, simplistic and I think this fits in really well with our thriller.
Here you can see the kind of clean cut typography we planned to use as inspiration for our own titles.
These are six of the different fonts that we really liked. I think they fit really well into our thriller.
In the programme, After Effects, we were able to choose with great detail the position, fill, stroke and size of our font. This really helped to create this more individual look, and enabled us to create exactly what we visualized.
We were able to change setting such as scales, effects and animations. This is where we added the animation ‘Decode’ which works really well with our thriller, because it runs on themes such as espionage.
For our main title, we wanted to have a slightly different effect, and so we created a zoom in effect after the ‘Decoder’ animation finishes, this implies its the title of the film in a much more obvious, and thriller-esque way.
We animated our text with ‘Decode’, once we had imported it into Premiere Pro we changed the position and scale of the text throughout the timeline, so it would appear to glide off the screen. This was something we really liked about the Bourne film titles.
From the various fonts, we ended up choosing this, we made it so that the different lines of the text were quite close together.
Editing Draft 1 – From Feedback
All of the feedback was really useful, so we’ve edited our Draft 1 sequence in response to this, below you can see some of the changes we have made to the sequence. Additionally, we shortened many of our clips as it was evident they went on longer then they needed too.
Here we added a fade transition to emphasis the dark, low key lighting surrounding the antagonist.
Here we have tried out some effects to the shot, using the ‘directional blur’ tool to make it much more dramatic and reflect his anger.
Here we used the colour correction wheel to change the tones of the clip, to try and get more of a thriller-esqe look.
Here we used the ‘cross fade’ transition between the two shots of the characters walking and got this graphic match cut.
Here we used the ‘sharpen’ tool to try and fix the slight blurriness that one of our peers pointed out.
Here we used the colour correction tool with three wheels which allowed us to get a very specific tone.
Draft 1
From our Rough Cut we started adding in the footage from our second shoot. There ended up being quite a lot of footage because we hadn’t got many shots of our antagonist. Therefore the main changes in draft one include extra content.
However, we started to use some more exciting editing techniques, which you can see below:
Some of our clips seemed a bit too yellow toned, so we used the ‘Luma Curve’ to give it a slightly whiter light to it. This colour correction has been very useful in giving our clips more contrast, especially between the shots of the antagonist and the protagonist.
We started to use transactions such as the fade at the end of the clip. This helps to imply what will happen after the film finishes, that the protagonist will likely get harmed by the antagonist. They also make it much more interesting to watch.
We finished putting together the all of the clips and finished off the basic editing, you can view our first draft below:
I think this cut is such an improvement from the rough cut because it actually feels slightly more like the protagonist is being followed and this was evidently the intention of our narrative. However, there is a still a lot to improve and fine tune within our thriller.
Feedback
After uploading our first draft to YouTube, we then got some feedback from other students, with targets for improvement for our next draft, which you can see below:
This set of feedback has been very useful in pointing out some of the continuity errors, and how some clips don’t work well together and so don’t make sense. From this we plan to cut down some of our clips to fix some of the errors and make it much sharper and faster paced to give a more thriller-like tone.
This feedback was really enjoyable to read, they complimented some of our shots and did think it fitted into the thriller genre. However she did give us a few targets including editing the yellow-tones out and shortening some of the shots. This is definitely something we plan to do!
In this set of feedback they seemed to really like the narrative of our sequence, but thought that we could shorten some of the clips to create this sense of tension and suspense. Additionally, they thought we could maybe introduce the antagonist earlier, which is something we will consider.
From all this feedback, one thing that has really stood out is that our clips are too long. Therefore in the next edit, we plan to cut down the length of the clips and create more tension and suspense which is typical of the thriller genre. It was really useful to get this feedback from our peers because we were able to get another perspective on our thriller sequence.
Additional Shoots Planning & Evaluation
We worked out that we really needed to film much more of James within our filmed, as there was no ‘chase’ between the characters. So we made a shot list of the shots we needed:
These are some of the shots that we’re really pleased with:
I like this shot of James putting his gloves on, it gives this eerie, sinister feeling as if he’s preparing for something. It also covers his identity further.
I really like the close up shot of James with a slight smile, it only shots some of his face, hiding his eyes and so identity. The black background makes the shot really interesting.
I really like this over the shoulder shot, we see that he’s on a computer doing some kind of coding and it seems quite sinister because of the low key lighting.
We got a good close up of the syringe in James’ hand. I love how the liquid is so yellow and contrasts so much with his character being all in black.
We’re really happy with some of the new shots that we’ve got, they really add a contrast to the shots of John, the lighting is low key and makes it much more interesting!