Wednesday 26 March 2014

Editing (2)

In this lesson we looked at shortening down the shots that way they would fit into the two minuets that we were allowed.

As the shots were long this took us quite some time because we had to decide what part of the clips that we liked best. Once this was done we looked at the whole title sequence and the time had been shortened down to roughly 1 minute and 30 seconds which we thought was a good amount of shot time as we still needed to add the titles between the shots where we wanted the titles to go.

THINGS TO DO:
Add titles and sort out the music that we want for the title sequence.

Friday 21 March 2014

Creating Titles


After looking at the font that we were using for our production company I decided to go to DaFont to download an appropriate font for us to use for our titles. 


After looking through the Horror genre I saw a font called Black Asylum which I though suited our genre perfectly and after showing Lucy, she agreed so I downloaded the font to the Mac and started to create the Titles for our sequence.

To create the titles I used Photoshop and looked at the people that we had chosen to be in our film and got the many different names for the crew that we needed, after doing this I started creating the titles.

The titles that I made my group thought were really good and the font really suited our genre. 

We chose to use the font as black to also go with the genre, however we noticed that when we put the titles into our title sequence that the titles would not be visible as most if the shots have dark effects over the original shot. 





THINGS TO DO:
Make the titles white with a black background.

Splitting the Group into Different Jobs

On the Friday lesson we knew exactly what we needed to do for our title sequence.

After having a talk with one of our teachers she advised us to split the group into doing different jobs for our title sequence and after talking to my group we decided this:

Editing would be done by Lucy since she did media at GCSE level and knew more things about it than me, which I was happy about because the jobs I had to do suited me better.

Making the titles would be done by me which our groups was happy about and also once I had made the titles I was to start looking at the sound we would use for the title sequence.

Things To Do:

Get a font and start creating the titles for the sequence.

Editing

On the Wednesday lesson we had two hours to order our title sequence which took longer than we expected. As we took more shots than we actually needed we had to go through the shots that we wanted and after picking the ones that we wanted we started to put them in the order that we wanted them to be in.

This took a long time because we had to number the story boards and make sure everything was in the right order. By the end of the lesson we had ordered the shots and put them into our title sequence.

Things To Do:

The next thing we need to do is to cut the shots down and make them fit into the amount of time the title sequence has to be.

Putting the Clips into Final Cut Pro

Once we came back to school on the following monday we had all the shots that we needed. We did add a few shots that wasn't originally on our story board but we thought that it would look better once the sequence was all together.

After finding out how to put all the files onto the Macs we put them into Final Cut Pro but as it was only a 1 hour lesson we didn't have enough time to put them all in order. 

Things To Do:

The next thing we need to do is to order the shots and make them correlate the the story board and cut them up. 

Filming (Wednesday)

After looking through the shots that we got filmed two days prior we noticed that we needed to get a couple more of the shots filmed so we went back to the same place where we filmed on the Monday and got the remaining shots done.

The shots that we needed were of Hallie walking up the slightly angled muddy patch and a few more of her walking in front of the camera.

We filmed these shots with ease as the weather was quite similar to Mondays weather so that made our job easier. 

Filming (Monday)

Once we went on the school holidays my group planned a day where we would go out and film most of the shots that we needed. we decided to go the woods that was closest to Hallie (our main actress) because she is only young and we didn't want to keep her out for too long. Her sister (and our groups friend) came with us to help control Hallie and to give some advice about what shots we should do but mostly because she knew the woods really well since she lives close to it. 

We were originally going to film on the Tuesday of half term but due to the good weather that occurred on the monday we decided to film on the monday. 

We already had the shots that we wanted on the story board sheet so my group brought them along that way we would know what shots we had to do. 

The first shot that we did included Hallie picking up a bunch of purple flowers that we found from a random patch in the woods. This shot was not supposed to happen but because we liked the idea so much we decided to keep the shot and also make it a match on action shot.

The next shot that we did was of Hallie walking in front of the camera that was supposed to be the beginning shot on the story board. 

We had to stop filming and move out of the way of the path when dog walkers and families came past, they were nice enough to hurry out of the way and were kind to us. Once all the people were out of the shot we could then continue to get our shots filmed.

Throughout the day we got most of the shots that we needed. Hallie became tired and wanted to go home after we filmed the canted angle shot of her walking through the middle of the woods. After we did this angled shot we convinced her to do it again but with Lucy (the other ghostly character) in the background. We decided to do these two shots to make our shots vary and because the setting was perfect that day we decided to do the shot there.

Wednesday 12 March 2014

Story Boarding Continued (2)

We continued storybarding, adding in the length of the shot and sound. We looked at other title sequences, focusing on what credits appeared when. We decided to keep our current credits in the same places, adding the details of the other credits as we added more frames to our storyboards (the cast and crew). We also discussed what sound we would use and what different clips we would use it in.

Group Feedback

Today we also had group feedback with one of our teachers.  We had to discuss our film and title sequence ideas so far.  We recorded our conversation:

Title Sequence Introduction


Today we looked further into title sequences. A title sequence is the method a film credits production and cast members using visuals and sound. Many title sequences aim to establish character, setting, genre, mood or atmosphere.

Common Credits are:

Production Companies
Producer
Title
Director
Other key crew 
Executive producer
Top billing actors

There are also different conventions for title sequences which are usually split into three parts:

Technical convention: Actual techniques used, e.g: cinematography, mise-en-scene, editing, sound.
Symbolic convention: Objects shown with deeper connotations/meanings.
Genre convention: Things that hint what genre the film is.


We looked at several title sequences.  These were:

The Avengers (1998)
Hulk (2003)
Se7en (1995)
Napoleon Dynamite (2004)
Juno (2007)

We discussed how the elements of mise-en-scene, sound, editing and cinematography all come together to set the mood for the film. We found they sometimes tell the story and give hints about what is going to happen. However, the audience may not always see the hints as they tend to be really slight so that it is hard to see.

We then looked at the credit timeline for Juno (2007). This showed us what credits appeared on the screen and what time.








We then went to the Mac room and analysed a title sequence of our own choice and did a credit timeline, I chose to do one for True Blood which is one of the TV Programmes that I watch.

Sound

Today we looked at different sounds that would correlate to our title sequences. We looked at copyright free music websites such as AudioNetwork. We searched "Horror" which turned out to be very successful and we got a lot of really good music that would go extremely well with the idea we have for our title sequence. For example, one music piece named 'Nightmares Before Bedtime' included piano which sounded like children's nursery rhymes yet with a creepy atmosphere which we thought would be absolutely great for our title sequence. We thought this would go perfectly with our storyboarding ideas of our young protagonist walking into the woods. We found another piece (Nightshade) that included a low, rhythmic beat which would blend well with the first piece, so we are definitely going to mix several music tracks together to rise the tension in our title sequence.

My teacher also suggested making our own music, using Logic Pro, so we played around with various sounds on that programme. This included an organ, violin and piano. However, I am not sure if we will actually use this idea in our title sequence.

Organising Filming

We created a schedule for the next week at school and over half term.  This was to plan what we did in lesson and when we filmed over half term, that way we new what we had to do on the days that we had the opportunity to do filming and other things to do with our final project.

Story Boarding Continued

After missing a double lesson we started our final story board and we started writing what type of shot we were going to use and where we would put the titles. 

After our group feedback and looking at title sequences similar to our film genre (horror/thriller), we considered what we had been told/seen and continued with our storyboards.  We focused on hinting our plot twist by showing more obvious pictures very quickly (for example, an extreme close up of a sliced neck with blood), and added these into our storyboards and then we numbered them in the order that we wanted to see in our final product.

Story Boarding

We started our story boarding and after discussing what we saw our title sequence looking like i started to draw out what we had discussed. We first did a rough draft of a story board to star us off and to leave open ideas that we may have in the future. We did our draft on one side of an A4 piece of paper. 

Questionnaires

This week we looked at receiving feedback from people that our chosen genre would appeal to as our target audience. Our homework was to do this by handing out questionnaires to our target audience and letting them fill out the questionnaire to know what they would expect from a horror / Thriller genre title sequence. We created a questionnaire with 10 questions and handed it out to people that fit in our primary and secondary target audience; males and females aged 15-25.

Typography

In todays lesson we focused on typography. We discussed what we thought typography was and after being told what it was we looked at different genres of films and how typography is used with the title sequences, we also discussed what colour and font the typography was and where it was placed on the screen.

Firstly, we looked at Catch Me If You Can (2002). This placed two different fonts next to each other.  The serif font reminded us of a typewriter, which we thought could relate to Tom Hank's character of a policeman. This was because he would have had to type up reports on a typewriter, also relating to the time period the film is set in.  
The second font was a sans serif font, which was used to create parts of the images on screen.  It is much more fluent than the serif font; changing and flowing into different objects.  This could represent Leonardo DiCaprio's character as he moves around the world with different identities and professions.  They are placed at the sides of the screen a lot, to allow the audience to focus on the images telling the story.

After looking at Catch Me If You Can, we then looked at Lord of War (2005). The font used for this title sequence gave us an idea that it was very military as it was in blocks, capitals and sans serif. This title sequence can relate to Catch Me If You Can because this sequence uses a considerably small font which will draw the attention to the video going on the the background which tells the story. An exception tot this would be the title which was massively larger text and was central. However, unlike Catch Me If You Can the text did not correlate to the action and had very little if not, no movement at all.



The last title sequence we looked at was Forrest Gump (1994). The genre of this film is drama/romance, therefore has a centered serif font, which fades in and out in a sort of dreamy manner which correlates tot eh genre of the film. The text is very plain, possibly connoting the main character. We also established that serif fonts are considered formal, posh, classic and timeless. 

In my title sequence, I will use a sans serif font as my genre is a thriller/horror film, not matching any of the films that we looked at, I will use a scratchy font that will show this and it will also better suit my genre.