Christmas Holidays

DUE TO EXAMS - 

THE CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS WILL COMPRISE OF REVISION. 

I'LL CONTINUE TO WORK ON THE 'THRILLER OPENING VIDEO' PROJECT.

AS OF 

WEDNESDAY 9TH JANUARY 2013.

Recording non-diegetic sound

When recording the non-diegetic sounds of dialogue to later externally put into the video, I decided to use my Iphone. (Chris then recorded his voiceover parts as 'the witness' on his iphone).

Initially I considered the technicalities of recording audio. As I have previously recorded and done some producing on Cubase and Logic this was a platform I considered. However, because the quality of the microphone on my Iphone I felt this was a justifiable option and instead opted to use this. 

By doing this we now have the audio of Tommy (The main antagonist) to put into the sequence. The dialogue of both the characters will feature in between the cafe shots, as well as over the sequences of flashbacks. This will be a great way of integrating the two different spaces of time. 

Draft #2

Here is the second draft of our thriller opening video. 

We realised on upload that the video had not been exported properly, hence the poorer quality video. However it will suffice as a draft and demonstrates of all the frames of the video we now have in place. 

The following parts of editing will consist of:

Recording Non-Diegetic sound.
Further sound consideration.
Considering a limited use of special effects.
A title screen. 

This draft will now be loaded into Final Cut Pro X on my computer. As a group we have agreed that my knowledge of the program and its greater 'bank' of effects and video tools will be of much more use to us than Final Cut Express. 

Filming #4

By piecing the footage together on Final Cut, we were able to find out which shots were left to get. I broke this down into 3 shots that were crucial to the story:

1) Chris (Witness) exiting shops.

2) Witness walking onto the estate.

3) A shot of him dropping his shopping bag when he notices the mob and victim. 

The jump between shots from the shop exit to the estate, is narrated over. Between the estate shots we have made references back to the cafe to avoid jumping shot to shot on the estate which would not look right or portray the flashback narrative correctly. 

Sound Scape

Since my research into sound featured within thriller films, I have begin giving consideration to the soundscape of our group's piece. A Soundscape is a very important aspect of a film, especially within the thriller and horror genres. As part of our group's research into sound, I have been looking into the possible avenues of royalty free samples to guarantee us the right type of sound for our thriller opening. I have browsed through pre-recorded diagetic sounds to place into our thriller during the last unsupervised lesson.

"Sound is 50 per cent of the motion picture experience" - George Lucas.

Though we might think of film as an essentially visual experience, the importance of film sound cannot be underestimated. The entire sound track is comprised of three essential ingredients:  

• the human voice (Dialogue) 

• sound effects (Ambience and Effects) 

• music (Soundtrack, Score)

These three tracks must be mixed and balanced in order to produce the necessary emphasis on effects and to create a desired audience response. These comprise to form the Soundscape. They are analogous to elements in the real world.

I have looked into various websites such as SoundJay and Sounddogs. I found both of these sites very useful, when searching for free audio. Here are just some of the sound effects we have considered:

'heartbeat' effect - This can be layered on top of the running scene during the beginning and at the ending of the opening when this scene is repeated, to realistically emphasize the character's emotions.

Cafe noise - Adding to the background scenery during the shots. Because the dialogue will be imported, we therefore need to essentially build our soundscape back up, so creating realistic cafe noise is a must. This is something we may also record ourselves instead of simply sampling it. 

'Eerie Atmospherics' - Providing a transition between the flashback sequences and the 'real-time' as the Witness narrates the story. This is something I am going to look into further because it is important we harness the right sort of music. I.e. Too over-the-top  could quite easily be mistaken as horror music which is not in keeping with our genre. 

A screenshot of one of the Sound archives I have been looking in to.

Animated Title Experimenting

I spent some of my time experimenting with Titles in our unsupervised lesson. 

After designing the logo in photoshop for our thriller, I will then move onto Apple Motion on my laptop where I can then create a full-working animation sequence of approximately 5 seconds.

Here are a few of my plans in photoshop so far: 

Here is my first attempt. The 'Bebas' font was something I found online and will definitely be using in the animation. By making this short animation, it will give my video more of a commercial-look, thus more realistic and professional as a music video.

With my second attempt, I focused on drawing more attention to the director name. Across the 3 lines I included an 'outer glow' effect and on the bottom line, included an inner shadow angled to give an effective shadow. 

Here's my third attempt, similar to the first but I took into consideration the screen placement. This will give me an idea of how I am going to go about making the frames of the sequence. (i.e. splitting it up into different colour effects and font manipulation). 

Although our project will read as 'The Witness', I was merely experimenting with my name, effectively as a director's title. This will be very helpful when it comes to constructing our final title. 

The first draft